THE THREAD OF GOLD 



THE 
THREAD OF GOLD 



BY 
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 

FELLOW OF MAGDALHNE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGB 
AUTHOR OF " THH KOUSB OF QUIET " 



Quern locum ndsti Tttihi destinatum f 
Quo meos gressus regis? 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

31 West Twenty-third Street 

1907 



sTs- 



LIBRARY of CONQRESS 
' Two CoDlei llaceivsd 
JUN 11 190/ 

CLASS du XXc, No. 
/ 



co*^ L 



J 



Copyrighted by 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

1907 



Ube 'Knidterbocher pvees, flew JSorb 



PREFACE. 

I SATE to-day, in a pleasant hour, at a place called 
The Seven Springs, high up in a green valley of 
the Cotswold hills. Close beside the road, seven 
clear rills ripple out into a small pool, and the air 
is musical with the sound of running water. Above 
me, in a little thicket, a full-fed thrush sent out 
one long-drawn cadence after another, in the joy 
of his heart, while the lengthening shadows of bush 
and tree crept softly over the pale sward of the old 
pasture-lands, in the westering light of the calm 
afternoon. 

These springs are the highest head-waters of 
the Thames, and that fact is stated in a somewhat 
stilted Latin hexameter carved on a stone of the 
wall beside the pool. The so-called Thames-head 
is in a meadow down below Cirencester, where a 
deliberate engine pumps up, from a hidden well, 
thousands of gallons a day of the purest water, 
which begins the service of man at once by helping 
to swell the scanty flow of the Thaines and Severn 
Canal. But The Seven Springs are the highest 
hill-fount of Father Thames for all that, streaming 
as they do from the eastward ridge of the great 
oolite crest of the downs that overhang Cheltenham. 



vi Preface. 

As soon as those rills are big enough to form a 
stream, the gathering of waters is known as the 
ChurUj which, speeding down by Rendcomb with 
its ancient oaks, and Cerney, in a green elbow of 
the valley, join the Thames at Cricklade. 

It was of the essence of poetry to feel that the 
water-drops which thus babbled out at my feet in 
the spring sunshine would be moving, how many 
days hence, beside the green playing-fields at Eton, 
scattered, diminished, travel-worn, polluted; but 
still, under night and stars, through the sunny 
river-reaches, through hamlet and city, by water- 
meadow or M'harf, the same and no other. And 
half in fancy, half in earnest, I bound upon the 
heedless waters a little message of love for the fields 
and trees so dear to me. 

What a strange parable it all made ! the sparkling 
drops so soon lost to sight and thought alike, each 
with its own definite place in the limitless mind of 
God, all numbered, none forgotten; each drop, 
bright, new-born, and fresh as it appeared, racing 
out so light-heartedlj" into the sun, — yet as old, and 
older, than the rocks from which it sprang! How 
often had those water-drops been woven into cloud- 
wreaths, through what centuries they had leapt and 
plunged among sea-billows, or lain cold and dark 
in the ocean depths, since the day when this mass of 
matter that we call the earth had been cut off and 



Peeface. vii 

sent whirling into space, a molten drop from the 
fierce vortex of its central sun! And, what is the 
strangest thought of all, I can sit here myself, a 
tiny atom spun from drift of storms, and concourse 
of frail dust, and, however dimly and faintly, depict 
the course of things, trace, through some subtle 
faculty, the movement of the mind of God through 
the Eeons ; and yet, though I can send my mind into 
the past and the future, though I can see the things 
that are not and the things that are, I am denied 
the least inkling of what it all signifies, what the 
slow movement of the ages is all aimed at, and even 
what the swift interchange of light and darkness, 
pain and pleasure, sickness and health, love and 
hate, is meant to mean to me — whether there is a 
purpose and an end at all, or whether I am just 
allowed, for my short space of days, to sit, a be- 
wildered spectator, at some vast and unintelligible 
drama. 

Yet to-day the soft sunshine, the babbling 
springs, the valley brimmed with haze, the bird's 
sweet song, all seem framed to assure me that 
God means us well, urgently, intensely well. " My 
Gospel," wrote one to me the other day, whose feet 
move lightly on the threshold of fife, " is the Gospel 
of contentment. I do not see the necessity of ask- 
ing myself uneasy and metaphysical questions 
about the Why and the Wherefore and the What." 



viii Preface. 

The necessity? Ah, no! But if one is forced, 
against one's will and hope, to go astray in the wil- 
derness out of the way, to find oneself lonely and 
hungry, one must needs pluck the bitter berries of 
the place for such sustenance as one can. I doubt, 
indeed, whether one is able to compel oneself into 
and out of certain trains of thought. If one dis- 
likes and dreads introspection, one will doubtless be 
happier for finding something definite to do in- 
stead. But even so, the thoughts buzz in one's 
ears; and then, too, the very wonder about such 
things in the world, such as Hamlet, or Keats's Ode 
to the Nightingale, things we could not well do 
without. Who is to decide which is the nobler, 
wiser, righter course — to lose oneself in a deep 
wonder, with an anxious hope that one may discern 
the light; or, on the other hand, to mingle with the 
world, to work, to plan, to strive, to talk, to do the 
conventional things? We choose (so we call it) 
the path that suits us best, though we disguise our 
motives in many ways, because we hardly dare to 
confess to ourselves how frail is our fagulty of 
choice at all. But, to speak frankly, what we all 
do is to follow the path where we feel most at home, 
most natural ; and the longer I live the more I feel 
that we do the things we are impelled to do, the 
works prepared for us to walk in, as the old collect 
says. How often, in real life, do we see any one 



Preface. ix 

making a clean sweep of all his conditions and sur- 
roundings, to follow the path of the soul? How 
often do we see a man abjure wealth, or resist am- 
bition, or disregard temperament, uneocpectedly? 
Not once, I think, to speak for myself, in the whole 
of my experience. 

This, then, is the motif of the following book: 
that, whether we are conquerors or conquered, tri- 
umphant or despairing, prosperous or pitiful, well 
or ailing, we are all these things through Him that 
loves us. We are here, I believe, to learn rather 
than to teach, to endure rather than to act, to be 
slain rather than to slay; we are tolerated in our 
errors and our hardness, in our conceit and our se- 
curity, by the great, kindly, smiling Heart that 
bade us be. We can make things a little easier for 
ourselves and each other; but the end is not there: 
what we are meant to become is joj^ful, serene, 
patient, waiting momently upon God; we are to 
become, if we can, content not to be content, full 
of tenderness and loving-kindness for all the frail 
beings that, like ourselves, suffer and rejoice. But 
though we are bound to ameliorate, to improve, to 
lessen, so far as we can, the brutal promptings of 
the animal self that cause the greatest part of our 
unhappiness, we have yet to learn to hope that when 
things seem at their worst they are perhaps at their 
best, for then we are, indeed, at work upon our hard 



X Preface. 

lesson; and perhaps the day may come when, look- 
ing back upon the strange tangle of our lives, we 
may see that the time was most wasted when we 
were serene, easy, prosperous, and unthinking, and 
most profitable when we were anxious, overshad- 
owed, and suffering. ' The Thread of Gold is the 
fibre of limitless hope that runs through our darkest 
dreams; and just as the water-drop which I saw 
break to-day from the darkness of the hill, and leap 
downwards in its channel, will see and feel, in its 
seaward course, many sweet and gentle things, as 
well as many hard and evil matters, so I, in a year 
of my pilgrimage, have set down in this book a 
frank picture of many little experiences and 
thoughts, both good and evil. Sometimes the wa- 
ter-drop glides in the sun among mossy ledges, or 
hngers by the edge of the copse, where the hazels 
lean together; but sometimes it is darkened and 
polluted, so that it would seem that the foul oozings 
that infect it could never be purged away. But 
the turbid elements, the scum, the mud, the slime — 
each of which, after all, has its place in the vast 
economy of things — float and sink to their destined 
abode; and the crystal drop, released and purified, 
runs joyfully onward in its appointed way. 

A. C. B. 

Cirencester, d,th April, 1907. 



THE THREAD OF GOLD 



INTRODUCTION 

I HAVE for a great part of my life desired, per- 
haps more than I have desired anything else, to 
make a beautiful book; and I have tried, perhaps 
too hard and too often, to do this, without ever 
quite succeeding; by that I mean that my little 
books, when finished, were not worthy to be com- 
pared with the hope that I had had of them. I 
think now that I tried to do too many things in my 
books, to amuse, to interest, to please persons who 
might read them; and I fear, too, that in the back 
of my mind there lay a thought, like a snake in its 
hole — the desire to show others how fine I could be. 
I tried honestly not to let this thought rule me; 
whenever it put its head out, I drove it back ; but of 
course I ought to have waited till it came out, and 
then killed it, if I had only known how to do that; 
but I suppose I had a secret tenderness for the lit- 
tle creature as being indeed a part of myself. 



2 The Thread of Gold 

But now I have hit upon a plan which I hope 
may succeed. I do not intend to try to be inter- 
esting and amusing, or even fine. I mean to put 
into my book only the things that appear to me 
deep and strange and beautiful; and I can happily 
say that things seem to me to be more and more 
beautiful every day. As when a man goes on a 
journey, and sees, in far-off lands, things that 
please him, things curious and rare, and buys them, 
not for himself or for his own delight, but for the 
delight of one that sits at home, whom he loves and 
thinks of, and wishes every day that he could see ; — 
well, I will try to be like that. I will keep the 
thought of those whom I love best in my mind — 
and God has been very good in sending me many, 
both old and young, whom I love — and I will try 
to put down in the best words that I can find the 
things that delight me, not for my sake but for 
theirs. For one of the strangest things of all about 
beauty is, that it is often more clearly perceived 
when expressed by another, than when we see it for 
ourselves. The only difficulty that I see ahead is 
that many of the things that I love best and that 
give me the best joy, are things that cannot be told, 
cannot be translated into words : deep and gracious 
mysteries, rays of light, delicate sounds. 

But I will keep out of my book all the things, 
so far as I can, which bring me mere trouble and 



The Thread of Gold 3 

heaviness ; cares and anxieties and bodilj^ pains and 
dreariness and unkind thoughts and anger, and all 
uncleanness. I cannot tell why our life should be 
so sadly bound up with these matters ; the only com- 
fort is that even out of this dark and heavy soil 
beautiful flowers sometimes spring. For instance, 
the pressure of a care, an anxiety, a bodily pain, has 
sometimes brought with it a perception which I 
have lacked when I have been bold and joyful and 
robust. A fit of anger too, by clearing away 
little clouds of mistrust and suspicion, has more 
than once given me a friendship that endures and 
blesses me. 

But beauty, innocent beauty of thought, of 
sound, of sight, seems to me to be perhaps the most 
precious thing in the world, and to hold within it a 
hope which stretches away even beyond the grave. 
Out of silence and nothingness we arise; we have 
our short space of sight and hearing; and then into 
the silence we depart. But in that interval we are 
surrounded by much joy. Sometimes the path is 
hard and lonely, and we stumble in miry ways ; but 
sometimes our way is through fields and thickets, 
and the valley is full of sunset light. If we could 
be more calm and quiet, less anxious about the im- 
pression we produce, more quick to welcome what 
is glad and sweet, more simple, more contented, 
what a gain would be there! I wonder more and 



4 The Thre^sd of Gold 

more every day that I live that we do not value 
better the thought of these calmer things, because 
the least effort to reach them seems to pull down 
about us a whole cluster of wholesome fruits, 
grapes of Eschol, apples of Paradise. We are 
kept back, it seems to me, by a kind of silly fear of 
ridicule, from speaking more sincerely and in- 
stantly of these delights. 

I read the Life of a great artist the other day 
who received a title of honour from the State. I 
do not think he cared much for the title itself, but 
he did care very much for the generous praise of his 
friends that the little piece of honour called forth. 
I will not quote his exact words, but he said in 
effect that he wondered why friends should think it 
necessary to wait for such an occasion to indulge in 
the noble pleasure of praising, and why they should 
not rather have a day in the year when they could 
dare to write to the friends whom they admired and 
loved, and praise them for being what they were. 
Of course if such a custom were to become general, 
it would be clumsily spoilt by foolish persons, as all 
things are spoilt which become conventional. But 
the fact remains that the sweet pleasure of praising, 
of encouraging, of admiring and telling our admir- 
ation, is one that we English people are sparing 
ing of, to our own loss and hurt. It is just as false 
to refrain from saying a generous thing for fear 



The Thread of Gold 5 

of being thought insincere and what is horribly 
called gushing, as it is to say a hard thing for the 
sake of being thought straightforward. If a hard 
thing must be said, let us say it with pain and ten- 
derness, but faithfully. And if a pleasant tiling 
can be said, let us say it with joy, and with no less 
faithfulness. 

Now I must return to my earlier purpose, and 
say that I mean that this little book shall go about 
with me, and that I will write in it only strange 
and beautiful things. I have many businesses in 
the world, and take delight in many of them; but 
we cannot always be busy. So when I have seen or 
heard something that gives me joy, whether it be a 
new place, or, what is better still, an old familiar 
place transfigured by some happy accident of sun 
or moon into a mystery; or if I have been told of a 
generous and beautiful deed, or heard even a sad 
story that has some seed of hope within it; or if I 
have met a gracious and kindly person ; or if I have 
read a noble book, or seen a rare picture or a curi- 
ous flower; or if I have heard a delightful music; 
or if I have been visited by one of those joyful and 
tender thoughts that set my feet the right way, I 
will try to put it down, God prospering me. For 
thus I think that I shall be truly interpreting his 
loving care for the little souls of men. And I call 
my book The Thread of Goldj because this beauty 



6 The Thrk.vd of Gold 

of which I have spoken seems to me a thing which 
runs hke a fine and precious clue through the dark 
and sunless labyrinths of the world. 

And, lastly, I pray God with all my heart, that 
he may, in this matter, let me help and not hinder 
his will. I often cannot divine what his will is, but 
I have seen and heard enough to be sure that it is 
high and holy, even when it seems to me hard to 
discern, and harder still to follow. Nothing shall 
here be set down that does not seem to me to be 
perfectly pure and honest; nothing that is not wise 
and true. It may be a vain hope that I nourish, 
but I think that God has put it into my heart to 
write this book, and I hope that he will allow me to 
persevere. And yet indeed I know that I am not 
fit for so holy a task, but perhaps he will give me 
fitness, and cleanse my tongue with a coal from his 
altar fire. 



I 



Very deep in this enchanted land of green hills 
in which I live, lies a still and quiet valley. No 
road runs along it ; but a stream with many curves 
and loops, deep-set in hazels and alders, moves 
brimming down. There is no house to be seen; 
nothing but pastures and little woods which clothe 
the hill-sides on either hand. In one of these fields, 
not far from the stream, lies a secluded spot that I 
visit duly from time to time. It is hard enough to 
find the place; and I have sometimes directed 
strangers to it, who have returned without discov- 
ering it. Some twenty yards away from the stream, 
with a ring of low alders growing round it, there is 
a pool; not like any other pool I know. The basin 
in which it lies is roughly circular, some ten feet 
across. I suppose it is four or five feet deep. 
From the centre of the pool rises an even gush of 
very pure water, with a certain hue of green, like a 
faintly-tinted gem. The water in its flow makes 
a perpetual dimpling on the surface; I have never 
known it to fail even in the longest droughts; and 

7 



8 The Thread of Gold 

in sharp frosty days there hangs a little smoke 
above it, for the water is of a noticeable warmth. 

This spring is strongly impregnated with iron, 
so strongly that it has a sharp and medical taste; 
from what secret bed of metal it comes I do not 
know, but it must be a bed of great extent, for, 
though the spring runs thus, day by day and year 
by year, feeding its waters ^^^th the bitter mineral 
over which it passes, it never loses its tinge; and 
the oldest tradition of the place is that it was even 
so centuries ago. 

All the rest of the pool is full of strange billowy 
cloudlike growths, like cotton-wool or clotted 
honey, all reddened with the iron of the spring; for 
it rusts on thus coming to the air. But the orifice 
you can always see, and that is of a dark blueness; 
out of which the pure green water rises among the 
vaporous and filmy folds, runs away briskly out of 
the pool in a little channel among alders, all stained 
with the same orange tints, and falls into the greater 
stream at a loop, tinging its waters for a mile. 

It is said to have strange health-giving qualities; 
and the water is drunk beneath the moon by old 
country folk for wasting and weakening com- 
plaints. Its strength and potency have no enmity 
to animal life, for the M^ater-voles burrow in the 
banks and plunge with a splash in the stream; but 
it seems that no vegetable thing can grow witliin 



The Red Spring 9 

it, for the pool and channel are always free of 
weeds. 

I like to stand upon the hank and watch the green 
water rise and dimple to the top of the pool, and to 
hear it bickering away in its rusty channel. But 
the beauty of the place is not a simple beauty; 
there is something strange and almost fierce about 
the red-stained water-course; something uncanny 
and terrifying about the filmy orange clouds that 
stir and sway in the pool; and there sleeps, too, 
round the edges of the basin a bright and viscous 
scum, with a certain ugly radiance, shot with 
colours that are almost too sharp and fervid for 
nature. It seems as though some diligent alchemy 
was at work, pouring out from moment to moment 
this strangely tempered potion. In summer it is 
more bearable to look upon, when the grass is 
bright and soft, when the tapestry of leaves and 
climbing plants is woven over the skirts of the 
thicket, when the trees are in joyful leaf. But in 
the winter, when all tints are low and spare, when 
the pastures are yellowed with age, and the hill-side 
wrinkled with cold, when the alder-rods stand up 
stiff and black, and the leafless tangled boughs are 
smooth like wire ; then the pool has a certain horror, 
as it pours out its rich juice, all overhung with thin 
steam. 

But I doubt not that I read into it some thoughts 



10 The Thre^vd of Gold 

of my own; for it was on such a day of winter, 
when the sky was full of inky clouds, and the wood 
murmured like a falling sea in the buffeting wind, 
that I made a grave and sad decision beside the red 
pool, that has since tinged my life, as the orange 
waters tinge the pale stream into which they fall. 
The shadow of that severe resolve still broods about 
the place for me. How often since in thought have 
I threaded the meadows, and looked with the in- 
ward eye upon the green water rising, rising, and 
the crowded orange-fleeces of the pool! But stern 
though the resolve was, it was not an unhappy one ; 
and it has brought into my life a firm and tonic 
quality, which seems to me to hold within it some- 
thing of the astringent savour of the medicated 
waters, and perhaps something of their health- 
giving powers as well. 



II 



I w^AS making a vague pilgrimage to-day in a 
distant and unfamiliar part of the country, a region 
that few people ever visit, and saw two things that 
moved me strangely. I left the high-road to ex- 
plore a hamlet that lay down in a broad valley to 
the left; and again diverged from the beaten track 
to survey an old grange that lay at a little distance 



The Deserted Shrine 11 

among the fields. Turning a corner by some cot- 
tages, I saw a small ancient chapel, of brown weath- 
ered stone, covered with orange lichen, the roof of 
rough stone tiles. In the narrow graveyard round 
it, the grass grew long and rank; the gateway was 
choked by briars. I could see that the windows of 
the tiny building were broken. I have never be- 
fore in England seen a derelict church, and I 
clambered over the wall to examine it more closely. 
It stood very beautifully ; from the low wall of the 
graveyard, on the further side, you could look over 
a wide extent of rich water-meadows, fed by full 
streams; there was much ranunculus in flower on 
the edges of the watercourses, and a few cattle 
moved leisurely about with a peaceful air. Far 
over the meadows, out of a small grove of trees, a 
manor-house held up its enquiring chimneys. The 
door of the chapel was open, and I have seldom 
seen a more pitiful sight than it revealed. The 
roof within was of a plain and beautiful design, 
with carved bosses, and beams of some dark wood. 
The chapel was fitted with oak Jacobean wood- 
work, pews, a reading-desk, and a little screen. At 
the west was a tiny balustraded gallery. But the 
whole was a scene of wretched confusion. The 
woodwork was mouldering, the red cloth of the pul- 
pit hung raggedly down, the leaves of the great 
prayer-book fluttered about the pavement, in the 



12 The Thread of Gold 

draught from the door. The whole place was 
gnawed by rats and shockingly befouled by birds; 
there was a litter of rotting nests upon the altar 
itself. Yet in the Malls were old memorial tablets, 
and the passage of the nave was paved with lettered 
graves. It brought back to me the beautiful lines — 

" En ara, ramis ilicis obsita, 
Quae sacra Chryses nomina fert deae, 
Neglecta; jamdudum sepultus 
Aedituus jacet et sacerdos." 

Outside the sun fell peacefully on the mellow walls, 
and the starlings twittered in the roof; but inside 
the deserted shrine there was a sense of broken 
trust, of old memories despised, of the altar of God 
shamed and dishonoured. It was a pious design 
to build the little chapel there for the secluded ham- 
let; and loving thought and care had gone to mak- 
ing the place seemly and beautiful. The very 
stone of the wall, and the beam of the roof cried out 
against the hard and untender usage that had laid 
the sanctuary low. Here children had been bap- 
tized, tender marriage vows plighted, and the dead 
laid to rest; and this was the end. I turned away 
with a sense of deep sadness; the veiy sunshine 
seemed blurred with a shadow of dreariness and 
shame. 

Then I made my way, by a stonj' road, towards 



The Deserted Shrine 13 

the manor-house ; and presently could see its gables 
at the end of a pleasant avenue of limes; but no 
track led thither. The gate was wired up, and the 
drive overgrown with grass. Soon, however, I 
found a farm-road which led up to the house from 
the village. On the left of the manor lay prosper- 
ous barns and byres, full of sleek pigs and busy 
crested fowls. The teams came clanking home 
across the water-meadows. The house itself be- 
came more and more beautiful as I approached. It 
was surrounded by a moat, and here, close at hand, 
stood another ancient chapel, in seemly repair. All 
round the house grew dense thickets of sprawling 
laurels, which rose in luxuriance from the edge of 
the water. Then I crossed a little bridge with a 
broken parapet ; and in front of me stood the house 
itself. I have seldom seen a more perfectly pro- 
portioned or exquisitely coloured building. There 
were three gables in the front, the central one hold- 
ing a beautiful oriel window, with a fine oak door 
below. The whole was built of a pale red brick, 
covered with a grey lichen that cast a shimmering 
light over the front. Tall chimneys of solid grace 
rose from a stone-shingled roof. The coigns, 
parapets and mullions were all of a delicately- 
tinted orange stone. To the right lay a big walled 
garden, full of floMcrs growing with careless rich- 
ness, the whole bounded by the moat, and looking 



14 The Theead of Gold 

out across the broad green water-meadows, beyond 
which the low hills rose softly in gentle curves and 
dingles. 

A whole companj'- of amiable dogs, spaniels and 
terriers, came out with an effusive welcome; a big 
black yard-dog, after a loud protesting bark, 
joined in the civilities. And there I sat down in 
the warm sun, to drink in the beauty of the scene, 
while the moor-hens cried plaintively in the moat, 
and the dogs disposed themselves at my feet. The 
man who designed this old place must have had a 
wonderful sense of the beauty of proportion, the 
charm of austere simplicity. Generation after 
generation must have loved the gentle dignified 
house, with its narrow casements, its high rooms. 
Though the name of the house, though the tale of 
its dwellers was unknown to me, I felt the appeal 
of the old associations that must have centred about 
it. The whole air, that quiet afternoon, seemed 
full of the calling of forgotten voices, and dead 
faces looked out from the closed lattices. So near 
to my heart came the spirit of the ancient house, 
that, as I mused, I felt as though even I myself 
had made a part of its past, and as though I were 
returning from battling with the far-off world to 
the home of childhood. The house seemed to re- 
gard me with a mournful and tender gaze, as 
though it knew that I loved it, and would fain utter 



The Manor-House 15 

its secrets in a friendly ear. Is it strange that a 
thing of man's construction should have so wistful 
yet so direct a message for the spirit? Well, I 
hardly know what it was that it spoke of ; but I felt 
the care and love that had gone to the making of it, 
and the dignity that it had won from rain and sun 
and the kindly hand of Nature; it spoke of hope 
and brightness, of youth and joy; and told me, too, 
that all things were passing away, that even the 
house itself, though it could outlive a few restless 
generations, was indeed debita morti, and bowed 
itself to its fall. 

And then I too, like a bird of passage that has 
alighted for a moment in some sheltered garden- 
ground, must needs go on my way. But the old 
house had spoken with me, had left its mark upon 
my spirit. And I know that in weary hours, far 
hence, I shall remember how it stood, peering out 
of its tangled groves, gazing at the sunrise and the 
sunset over the green flats, waiting for what may 
be, and dreaming of the days that are no more. 



Ill 



I HAVE had a taste, during the last few days, I 
know not why, of the cup of what Gray called 
Leucocholy; it is not JNIelancholy, only the pale 



16 Theead of Gold 

shadow of it. That dark giant is, doubtless, stalk- 
ing somewhere in the background, and the shadow 
cast by his misshapen head passes over my little 
garden ground. 

I do not readily submit to this mood, and I would 
wish it away. I would rather feel joyful and free 
from blame; but Gray called it a good easy state, 
and it certainly has its compensations. It does 
not, like JNIelancholy, lay a dark hand on duties and 
pleasures alike; it is possible to work, to read, to 
talk, to laugh when it is by. But it sends flowing 
through the mind a gentle current of sad and weary 
images and thoughts, which still have a beauty of 
their own; it tinges one's life with a sober greyness 
of hue; it heightens perception, though it prevents 
enjoyment. In such a mood one can sit silent a 
long time, with one's eyes cast upon the grass; one 
sees the delicate forms of the tender things that 
spring softly out of the dark ground; one hears 
with a piognant delight the clear notes of birds; 
something of the spring languors move within the 
soul. There is a sense, too, of reaching out to light 
and joy, a stirring of the vague desires of the heart, 
a tender hope, an upward-climbing faith ; the heart 
sighs for a peace that it cannot attain. 

To-day I walked slowly and pensively by little 
woods and pastures, taking delight in all the quiet 
life I saw, the bush pricked with points of green, 



Leucocholy 17 

the boughs thickened with small reddening buds, 
the slow stream moving through the pasture; all 
the tints faint, airy, and delicate; the life of the 
world seemed to hang suspended, waiting for the 
forward leap. In a little village I stood awhile 
to watch the gables of an ancient house, the wing of 
a ruined grange, peer solemnly over the mellow 
brick wall that guarded a close of orchard trees. 
A little way behind, the blunt pinnacles of the old 
church-tower stood up, blue and dim, over the 
branching elms; beyond all ran the long, pure line 
of the rising wold. Everything seemed so still, so 
serene, as a long, pale ray of the falling sun, which 
laboured among flying clouds, touched the west- 
ward gables with gold — and mine the only 
troubled, unquiet spirit. Hard by there was an old 
man tottering about in a little garden, fumbling 
with some plants, like Laertes on the upland farm. 
His worn face, his ragged beard, his pitifully- 
patched and creased garments made him a very type 
of an ineffectual sadness. Perhaps his thoughts 
ran as sadly as my own, but I do not think it was 
so, because the minds of many country-people, 
and of almost all the old, of whatever degree, 
seem to me free from what is the curse of delicately- 
trained and highly-strung temperaments — namely, 
the temptation to be always reverting to the past, 
or forecasting the future. Simple people and aged 



18 The Thread of Gold 

people put that aside, and live quite serenely in the 
moment ; and that is what I believe we ought all to 
attempt, for most moments are bearable, if one 
only does not import into them the weight of the 
future and the regret of the past. To seize the 
moment with all its conditions, to press the quality 
out if it, that is the best victory. But, alas ! we are 
so made that though we may know that a course is 
the wise, the happy, the true course, we cannot al- 
ways pursue it. I remember a story of a pubHc 
man who bore his responsibilities very hardly, wor- 
ried and agonised over him, saying to Mr. Glad- 
stone, who was at that time in the very thick of a 
fierce political crisis : " But don't you find you lie 
awake at night, thinking how you ought to act, and 
how you ought to have acted?" Mr. Gladstone 
turned his great, flashing eyes upon his interlocu- 
tor, and said, with a look of wonder: " No, I don't; 
where would be the use of that?" And again I 
remember that old Canon Beadon — who lived, I 
think, to his 104th year — said to a friend that the 
secret of long life in his own case was that he had 
never thought of anything unpleasant after ten 
o'clock at night. Of course, if you have a series of 
compartments in your brain, and at ten o'clock can 
turn the key quietly upon the room that holds the 
skeletons and nightmares, you are a very fortunate 
man. 



Leucocholy 19 

But still, we can all of us do something. If one 
has the courage and good sense, when in a melan- 
choly mood, to engage in some piece of practical 
work, it is wonderful how one can distract the great 
beast that, left to himself, crops and munches the 
tender herbage of the spirit. For myself I have 
generally a certain number of dull tasks to per- 
form, not in themselves interesting, and out of 
which little pleasure can be extracted, except the 
pleasure which always results from finishing a piece 
of necessary work. When I am wise, I seize upon 
a day in which I am overhung with a shadow of 
sadness to clear off work of this kind. It is in it- 
self a distraction, and then one has the pleasure 
both of having fought the mood and also of having 
left the field clear for the mind, when it has recov- 
ered its tone, to settle down firmly and joyfully to 
more congenial labours. 

To-day, little by little, the cloudy mood drew 
off and left me smiling. The love of the peaceful 
and patient earth came to comfort me. How pure 
and free were the long lines of ploughland, the 
broad back of the gently-swelling down! How 
clear and delicate were the February tints, the aged 
grass, the leafless trees! What a sense of coolness 
and repose! I stopped a long time upon a rustic- 
timbered bridge to look at a little stream that ran 
beneath the road, winding down through a rough 



20 The Thre^u) of Gold 

pasture-field, with many thorn-thickets. The wa- 
ter, lapsing slowly through withered flags, had the 
pure, gem-like quality of the ^\inter stream ; in sum- 
mer it will become dim and turbid with infusorial 
life, but now it is like a pale jewel. How strange, 
I thought, to think of this liquid gaseous juice, 
which we call water, trickling in the cracks of the 
earth! And just as the fish that live in it think of 
it as their world, and have little cognisance of 
what happens in the acid, unsubstantial air above, 
except the occasional terror of the dim, looming 
forms which come past, making the soft banks 
quiver and stir, so it may be with us; there may be 
a great mysterious world outside of us, of which 
we sometimes see the dark manifestations, and yet 
of the conditions of which we are wholly 
unaware. 

And now it grew dark; the horizon began to 
redden and smoulder; the stream gleamed like a 
wan thread among the distant fields. It was time 
to hurry home, to dip in the busy tide of life again. 
Where was my sad mood gone? The clear air 
seemed to have blown through my mind, hands had 
been waved to me from leafless woods, quiet voices 
of field and stream had whispered me their secrets; 
" We would tell, if we could," they seemed to say. 
And I, listening, had learned patience, too — for 
awhile. 



The Flower 21 

IV 

I HAVE made friends with a new flower. If it 
had a simple and wholesome English name, I would 
like to know it, though I do not care to know what 
ugly and clumsy title the botany books may give 
it; but it lives in my mind, a perfect and complete 
memory of brightness and beauty, and, as I have 
said, a friend. 

It was in a steep sea-cove that I saw it. Round 
a small circular basin of blue sea ran up gigantic 
cliffs, grey limestone bluffs; here and there, where 
they were precipitous, slanted the monstrous wavy 
lines of distorted strata, thrust up, God alone knows 
how many ages ago, by some sharp and horrible 
shiver of the boiling earth. Little waves broke on 
the pebbly beach at our feet, and all the air was full 
of pleasant sharp briny savours. A few boats were 
drawn up on the shingle ; lobster-pots, nets, strings 
of cork, spars, oars, lay in pleasant confusion, by 
the sandy road that led up to the tiny hamlet above. 
We had travelled far that day and were comfort- 
ably weary; we found a sloping ledge of turf upon 
which we sat, and presently became aware that on 
the little space of grass between us and the cliff 
must once have stood a cottage and a cottage gar- 
den. There was a broken wall behind us, and the 
httle platform still held some garden flowers 



22 The Thread of Gold 

sprawling wildly, a stunted fruit-bush or two, a 
knotted apple-tree. 

JNIy own flower, or the bushes on which it grew, 
had once, I think, formed part of the cottage ledge ; 
but it had found a wider place to its liking, for it 
ran riot everywhere; it scaled the cliff, where, too, 
the golden wall-flowers of the garden had gained 
a footing; it fringed the sandpatches beyond us, 
it rooted itself firmly in the shingle. The plant had 
rough light-brown branches, which were now all 
starred with the greenest tufts imaginable; but the 
flower itself! On many of the bushes it was not 
yet fully out, and showed only in an abundance of 
small lilac balls, carefully folded; but just below 
me a cluster had found the sun and the air too 
sweet to resist, and had opened to the light. The 
flower was of a delicate veined purple, a five- 
pointed star, with a soft golden heart. All the 
open blossoms stared at me with a tranquil gaze, 
knowing I would not hurt them. 

Below, two fishermen rowed a boat quietly out 
to sea, the sharp creaking of the rowlocks coming 
lazily to our ears in the pauses of the wind. The 
little waves fell with a soft thud, followed by the 
crisp echo of the surf, feeling all round the shingly 
cove. The whole place, in that fresh spring day, 
was unutterably peaceful and content. 

And I too forgot all my busy schemes and hopes 



The Flower 23 

and aims, the tiny part I play in the world, with so 
much petty energy, such anxious responsibility. 
My purple-starred flower approved of my acqui- 
escence, smiling trustfully upon me. " Here," it 
seemed to say, " I bloom and brighten, spring after 
spring. No one regards me, no one cares for me; 
no one praises my beauty; no one sorrows when 
these leaves grow pale, when I fall from my stem, 
when my dry stalks whisper together in the winter 
wind. But to you, because you have seen and loved 
me, I whisper my secret." And then the flower 
told me something that I cannot write even if I 
would, because it is in the language unspeakable, 
of which St. Paul wrote that such words are not 
lawful for a man to utter ; but they are heard in the 
third heaven of God. 

Then I felt that if I could but remember what 
the flower said I should never grieve or strive or 
be sorrowful any more; but, as the wise Psalmist 
said, be content to tarry the Lord's leisure. Yet, 
even when I thought that I had the words by 
heart, they ceased like a sweet music that comes to 
an end, and which the mind cannot recover. 

I saw many other things that day, things beauti- 
ful and wonderful, no doubt ; but they had no voice 
for me, like the purple flower; or if they had, the 
sea wind drowned them in the utterance, for 
their voices were of the earth; but the flower's 



24 The Thread of Gold 

voice came, as I have said, from the innermost 
heaven. 

I like well to go on pilgrimage; and in spite of 
M^eariness and rainy weather, and the stupid chat- 
ter of the men and women who congregate like 
fowls in inn-parlours, I pile a little treasure of 
sights and sounds in my guarded heart, memories 
of old buildings, spring woods, secluded valleys. 
All these are things seen, impressions registered 
and gratefully recorded. But my flower is some- 
how different from all these; and I shall never again 
hear the name of the place mentioned, or even see a 
map of that grey coast, without a quiet thrill of 
gladness at the thought that there, spring by 
spring, blooms my little friend, whose heart I read, 
who told me its secret; who will wait for me to re- 
turn, and indeed will be faithfully and eternally 
mine, whether I return or no. 



V 



I HA^T. lately become convinced — and I do not 
say it either sophistically, to plead a bad cause with 
dexterity, or resignedly, to make the best out of a 
poor business; but with a true and hearty convic- 
tion — that the most beautiful country in England 
is the flat fenland. I do not here mean moderately] 



The Fens 25 

flat country, low sweeps of land, like the heaving 
of a dying groundswell; that has a miniature 
beauty, a stippled delicacy of its own, but it is not 
a fine quality of charm. The country that I would 
praise is the rigidly and mathematically flat coun- 
try of Eastern England, lying but a few feet above 
the sea plains which were once the bottoms of huge 
and ancient swamps. 

In the first place, such country gives a wonder- 
ful sense of expanse and space; from an eminence 
of a few feet you can see what in other parts of 
England j^ou have to climb a considerable hill to 
discern. I love to feast my eyes on the intermin- 
able rich level plain, with its black and crumbling 
soil; the long simple lines of dykes and water- 
courses carry the eye peacefully out to a great 
distance ; then, too, by having all the landscape com- 
pressed into so narrow a space, into a belt of what 
is, to the eye, only a few inches in depth, you get 
an incomparable richness of colour. The solitary 
distant clumps of trees surrounding a lonely farm 
gain a deep intensity of tint from the vast green 
level all about them ; and the line of the low far-off 
wolds, that close the view many miles away, is of 
a peculiar delicacy and softness; the eye, too, is 
provided with a foreground of which the elements 
are of the simplest; a reedy pool enclosed by wil- 
lows, the clustered buildings of a farmstead ; a grey 



26 The Thre^vd of Gold 

church-tower peering out over churchyard elms; 
and thus, instead of heing checked by near objects, 
and hemmed in by the hmited landscape, the eye 
travels out across the plain with a sense of freedom 
and grateful repose. Then, too, there is the huge 
perspective of the sky; nowhere else is it possible 
to see, so widely, the slow march of clouds from 
horizon to horizon; it all gives a sense of largeness 
and tranquillity such as you receive upon the sea, 
with the additional advantage of having the solid 
earth beneath you, green and fertile, instead of the 
steely waste of waters. 

A day or two ago I found myself beside the 
lower waters of the Cam, in flat pastures, full of 
ancient thorn-trees just bursting into bloom. I 
gained the towing-path, which led me out gradually 
into the heart of the fen; the river ran, or rather 
moved, a sapphire streak, between its high green 
flood-banks ; the wide spaces between the embanked 
path and the stream were full of juicy herbage, 
great tracts of white cow-parsley, with here and 
there a reed-bed. I stood long to listen to the 
sharp song of the reed-warbler, slipping from 
spray to spray of a willow-patch. Far to the north 
the great tower of Ely rose blue and dim above 
the low lines of trees; in the centre of the pastures 
lay the long brown line of the sedge-beds of Wicken 
Mere, almost the only untouched tract of fenland; 



The Fens 27 

slow herds of cattle grazed, more and more minute, 
in the unhedged pasture-land, and the solitary fig- 
ure of a labourer moving homeward on the top of 
the green dyke, seemed in the long afternoon to 
draw no nearer. Here and there were the flood- 
gates of a lode, with the clear water slowly spilling 
itself over the rim of the sluice, full of floating 
weed. There was something infinitely reposeful in 
the solitude, the width of the landscape; there was 
no sense of crowded life, no busy figures, intent on 
their small aims, to cross one's path, no conflict, no 
strife, no bitterness, no insistent voice; yet there 
was no sense of desolation, but rather the spectacle 
of glad and simple lives of plants and birds in the 
free air, their wildness tamed by the far-off and 
controlling hand of man, the calm earth patiently 
serving his ends. I seemed to have passed out of 
modern life into a quieter and older world, before 
men congregated into cities, but lived the quiet and 
sequestered life of the country-side; and little by 
little there stole into my heart something of a 
dreamful tranquility, the calm of the slow brimming 
stream, the leisurely herds, the growing grass. All 
seemed to be moving together, neither lingering 
nor making haste, to some far-off end within the 
quiet mind of God. Everything seemed to be 
w^aiting, musing, living the untroubled life of nat- 
ure, with no thought of death or care or sorrow. I 



28 The Thread of Gold 

passed a trench of still water that ran as far as the 
eye could follow it across the flat ; it was full from 
end to end of the beautiful water-violet, the pale 
lilac flowers, with their faint ethereal scent, clus- 
tered on the head of a cool emerald spike, with the 
rich foliage of the plant, like fine green hair, filling 
the water. The rising of these beautiful forms, by 
some secret consent, in their appointed place and 
time, out of the fresh clear water, brought me a 
wistful sense of peace and order, a desire for I 
hardly know what — a poised stateliness of life, a 
tender beauty — if I could but win it for myself! 

On and on, hour by hour, that still bright after- 
noon, I made my slow way over the fen; insensibly 
and softly the far-off villages fell behind; and yet 
I seemed to draw no nearer to the hills of the hori- 
zon. Now and then I passed a lonely grange; 
once or twice I came near to a tall shuttered en- 
gine-house of pale brick, and heard the slow beat 
of the pumps within, like the pulse of a hidden 
heart, which drew the marsh-water from a hundred 
runlets, and poured it slowly seawards. Field after 
field slid past me, some golden from end to end 
with buttercups, some waving with j'oung wheat, 
till at last I reached a solitary inn beside a ferry, 
with the quaint title : " No hurry ! five miles from 
anywhere." And here I met with a grave and 
kindly welcome, such as warms the heart of one 



The Well and the Chapel 29 

who goes on pilgrimage : as though I was certainly 
expected, and as if the lord of the place had given 
charge concerning me. It would indeed hardly 
have surprised me if I had been had into a room, 
and shown strange symbols of good and evil; or if 
I had been given a roll and a bottle, and a note of 
the way. But no such presents were made to me, 
and it was not until after I had left the little house, 
and had been ferried in an old blackened boat across 
the stream, that I found that I had the gifts in my 
bosom all the while. 

The roll was the fair sight that I had seen, in this 
world where it is so sweet to live. JMy cordial was 
the peace within my spirit. And as for the way, it 
seemed plain enough that day, easy to discern and 
follow; and the heavenly city itself as near and 
visible as the blue towers that rose so solemnly 
upon the green horizon. 



VI 



It is not often that one is fortunate enough to 
see two perfectly beautiful things in one day. But 
such was my fortune in the late summer, on a day 
that was in itself perfect enough to show what 
September can do, if he only has a mind to plan 
hours of dehght for man. The distance was very 



30 The Thread of Gold 

blue and marvellously clear. The trees had the 
bronzed look of the summer's end, with deep azure 
shadows. The cattle moved slowly about the fields, 
and there was harvesting going on, so that the vil- 
lages we passed seemed almost deserted. I will 
not say whence we started or where we went, and I 
shall mention no names at all, except one, which 
is of the nature of a symbol or incantation ; for I do 
not desire that others should go where I went, un- 
less I could be sure that they went with the same 
peace in their hearts that I bore with me that da3\ 

One of the places we visited on purpose; the 
other we saw by accident. On the small map we 
carried was marked, at the corner of a little wood 
that seemed to have no way to it, a well with the 
name of a saint, of whom I never heard, though 
I doubt not she is written in the book of God. 

We reached the nearest point to the well upon 
the road, and we struck into the fields; that was a 
sweet place where we found ourselves! In ancient 
days it had been a marsh, I think. For great 
ditches ran everywhere, choked with loose-strife 
and water-dock, and the ground quaked as we 
walked, a pleasant springy black mould, the dust 
of endless centuries of the rich water plants. 

To the left, the ground ran up sharply in a min- 
ute bluff, with the soft outline of underlying chalk, 
covered with small thorn-thickets; and it was all 



The Well 31 

encircled with small, close woods, where we heard 
the pheasants scamper. We found an old, slow, 
bovine man, with a cheerful face, who readily threw 
aside some fumbling work he was doing, and 
guided us ; and we should never have found the spot 
without him. He led us to a stream, crossed by a 
single plank with a handrail, on which some child- 
ren had put a trap, baited with nuts for the poor 
squirrels, that love to run chattering across the rail 
from wood to wood. Then we entered a little 
covert; it was very pleasant in there, all dark and 
green and still; and here all at once we came to the 
place; in the covert were half a dozen little steep 
pits, each a few yards across, dug out of the chalk. 
From each of the pits, which lay side by side, a 
channel ran down to the stream, and in each chan- 
nel flowed a small bickering rivulet of infinite clear- 
ness. The pits themselves were a few feet deep ; at 
the bottom of each was a shallow pool, choked with 
leaves; and here lay the rare beauty of the place. 
The water rose in each pit out of secret ways, but 
in no place that we could see. The first pit was 
still when we looked upon it ; then suddenly the wa- 
ter rose in a tiny eddy, in one corner, among the 
leaves, sending a little ripple glancing across the 
pool. It was as though something, branch or in- 
sect, had fallen from above, the water leapt so 
suddenly. Then it rose again in another place, 



32 The Thread of Gold 

then in another; then five or six httle freshets rose 
all at once, the rings crossing and recrossing. And 
it was the same in all the pits, which we visited one 
by one; we descended and drank, and found the 
water as cold as ice, and not less pure; while the 
old man babbled on about the waste of so much 
fine water, and of its virtues for weak eyes : "Ain't 
it cold, now? Ain't it, then? My God, ain't it? " 
— he was a man with a rich store of simple assever- 
ations, — "And ain't it good for weak eyes neither! 
You must just come to the place the first thing in 
the morning, and wash your eyes in the water, and 
ain't it strengthening then!" So he chirped on, 
saying everything over and over, like a bird among 
the thickets. 

We paid him for his trouble, with a coin that 
made him so gratefully bewildered that he said to 
us : " Now, gentlemen, if there's anything else that 
5'^ou want, give it a name; and if you meet any one 
as you go away, say ' Perrett told me ' (Perrett 's 
my name), and then you'll see! " What the pre- 
cise virtue of this invocation was, we did not have 
an opportunity of testing, but that it was a talis- 
man to unlock hidden doors, I make no doubt. 

We went back silently over the fields, with the 
wonder of the thing still in our minds. To think 
of the pure wells bubbling and flashing, by day and 
by night, in the hot summer weather, when the 



The Chapel 33 

smell of the wood lies warm in the sun; on cold 
winter nights under moon and stars, forever cast- 
ing up the bright elastic jewel, that men call water, 
and feeding the flowing stream that wanders to the 
sea. I was very full of gratitude to the pure 
maiden saint that lent her name to the well, and I 
am sure she never had a more devout pair of 
worshippers. 

So we sped on in silence, thinking — at least I 
thought — how the water leaped and winked in the 
sacred wells, and how clear showed the chalk, and 
the leaves that lay at the bottom: till at last we 
drew to our other goal. " Here is the gate," said 
my companion at last. 

On one side of the road stood a big substantial 
farm; on the other, by a gate, was a little lodge. 
Here a key was given us by an old hearty man, 
with plenty of advice of a simple and sententious 
kind, until I felt as though I were enacting a part 
in some little Pilgrim's Progress^ and as if Mr. 
Interpreter himself, with a very grave smile, would 
come out and have me into a room by myself, to 
see some odd pleasant show that he had provided. 
But it was perhaps more in the manner of Evange- 
list j for our guide pointed with his finger across a 
very wide field, and showed us a wicket to enter 
in at. 

Here was a great flat grassy pasture, the water 



34 The Thee^U) of Gold 

again very near the surface, as the long-leaved wa- 
ter-plants, that sprawled in all the ditches, showed. 
But when we reached the wicket we seemed to be 
as far removed from humanity as dwellers in a 
lonely isle. A few cattle grazed drowsily, and the 
crisp tearing of the grass by their big lips came 
softly across the pasture. Inside the wicket stood 
a single ancient house, uninhabited, and festooned 
with ivy into a thing more bush than house ; though 
a small Tudor window peeped from the leaves, like 
the little suspicious eye of some shaggy beast. 

A stone's throw away lay a large square moat, 
full of water, all fringed with ancient gnarled 
trees; the island wliich it enclosed was overgrown 
with tiny thickets of dishevelled box-trees, and 
huge sprawling laurels; we walked softly round it, 
and there was our goal : a small church of a whitish 
stone, in the middle of a little close of old sycamores 
in stiff summer leaf. 

It stood so remote, so quietly holy, so ancient, 
that I could think of nothing but the " old febel 
chapel " of the Morte d' Arthur. It had, I know 
not why, the mysterious air of romance all about it. 
It seemed to sit, musing upon what had been and 
what should be, smilingly guarding some tender 
secret for the pure-hearted, full of the peace the 
world cannot give. 

Within it was cool and dark, and had an ancient 



The Chapel 35 

holy smell; it was furnished sparely with seat and 
screen, and held monuments of old knights and 
ladies, sleeping peacefully side by side, heads pil- 
lowed on hands, looking out with quiet eyes, as 
though content to wait. 

Upon the island in the moat, we learned, had 
stood once a flourishing manor, but through what 
sad vicissitudes it had fallen into dust I care not. 
Enough that peaceful lives had been lived there; 
children had been born, had played on the moat- 
edge, had passed away to bear children of their own, 
had returned with love in their hearts for the old 
house. From the house to the church children 
had been borne for baptism; merry wedding pro- 
cessions had gone to and fro, happy Christmas 
groups had hurried backwards and forwards; and 
the slow funeral pomp had passed thither, under 
the beating of the slow bell, bearing one that should 
not return. 

Something of the love and life and sorrow of 
the good days passed into my mind, and I gave a 
tender thought to men and women whom I had 
never known, who had tasted of life, and of joyful 
things that have an end; and who now know the 
secret of the dark house to which we all are bound. 

When we at last rose unwillingly to go, the sun 
was setting, and flamed red and brave through the 
gnarled trunks of the little wood; the mist crept 



36 The Thread of Gold 

over the pasture, and far away the hghts of the 
lonely farm began to wink through the gathering 
dark. 

But I had seen! Something of the joy of the 
two sweet places had settled in my mind ; and now, 
in fretful, weary, wakeful hours, it is good to think 
of the clear wells that sparkle so patiently in the 
dark wood; and, better still, to wander in mind 
about the moat and the little silent church; and to 
wonder what it all means; what the love is that 
creeps over the soul at the sight of these places, so 
full of a remote and delicate beauty; and whether 
the hunger of the heart for peace and permanence, 
which visits us so often in our short and difficult 
pilgrimage, has a counterpart in the land that is 
veiy far off. 

VII 

I HAVE been much haunted. Indeed Infested, if 
the word may be pardoned, by cuckoos lately; 
When I was a child, acute though my observation 
of birds and beasts and natural things was, I do 
not recollect that I ever saw a cuckoo, though I 
often tried to stalk one by the ear, following the 
sweet siren melody, as it dropped into the expectant 
silence from a hedgerow tree; and I remember to 



The Cuckoo 37 

have heard the notes of two, that seemed to answer 
each other, draw closer each time they called. 

But of late I have become familiar with the sil- 
very grey body and the gliding flight ; and this year 
I have been almost dogged by them. One flew 
beside me, as I rode the other day, for nearly a 
quarter of a mile along a hedgerow, taking short 
gliding flights, and settling till I came up ; I could 
see his shimmering wings and his long barred tail. 
I dismounted at last, and he let me watch him for 
a long time, noting his small active head, his decent 
sober coat. Then, when he thought I had seen 
enough, he gave one rich bell-like call, with the full 
force of his soft throat, and floated off. 

He seemed loath to leave me. But what word 
or gift, I thought, did he bring with him, false and 
pretty bird? Do I too desire that others should 
hatch my eggs, content with flute-like notes of 
pleasure ? 

And yet how strange and marvellous a thing 
this instinct is; that one bird, by an absolute and 
unvarying instinct, should forego the dear business 
of nesting and feeding, and should take shrewd ad- 
vantage of the labours of other birds! It cannot 
be a deliberately reasoned or calculated thing; at 
least we say that it cannot ; and yet not Darwin and 
all his followers have brought us any nearer to the 
method by which such an instinct is developed and 



38 The Thread of Gold 

trained, till it has become an absolute law of the 
tribe; making it as natural a thing for the cuckoo 
to search for a built nest, and to cast away its* 
foundling egg there, as it is for other birds to wel- 
come and feed the intruder. It seems so satani- 
cally clever a thing to do; such a strange fantastic 
whim of the Creator to take thought in originating 
it! It is this whimsicality, the bizarre humour in 
Nature, that puzzles me more than anything in the 
world, because it seems like the sport of a child with 
odd inconsequent fancies, and with omnipotence 
behind it all the time. It seems strange enough to 
think of the laws that govern the breeding, nesting, 
and nurture of birds at all, especially when one con- 
siders all the accidents that so often make the toil 
futile, like the stealing of eggs by other birds, and 
the predatory incursions of foes. One would ex- 
pect a law, framed by omnipotence, to be invari- 
able, not hampered by all kinds of difficulties that 
omnipotence, one might have thought, could have 
provided against. And then comes this further 
strange variation in the law, in the case of this single 
family of birds, and the mystery thickens and deep- 
ens. And stranger than all is the existence of the 
questioning and unsatisfied human spirit, that ob- 
serves these things and classifies them, and that yet 
gets no nearer to the solution of the huge, fantastic, 
patient plan ! To make a law, as the Creator seems 



The Cuckoo 39 

to have done; and then to make a hundred other 
laws that seem to make the first law inoperative ; to 
play this gigantic game centmy after century; and 
then to put into the hearts of our inquisitive race 
the desire to discover what it is all about; and to 
leave the desire unsatisfied. What a labyrinthine 
mystery! Depth beyond depth, and circle beyond 
circle ! 

It is a dark and bewildering region that thus 
opens to the view. But one conclusion is to be- 
ware of seeming certainties, to keep the windows of 
the mind open to the light; not to be over-anxious 
about the little part we have to play in the great 
pageant, but to advance, step by step, in utter 
trustfulness. 

Perhaps that is your message to me, graceful 
bird, with the rich joyful note! With what a 
thrill, too, do you bring back to me the brightness 
of old forgotten springs, the childish rapture at the 
sweet tunable cry! Then, in those far-off days, it 
was but the herald of the glowing summer days, 
the time of play and flowers and scents. But now 
the soft note, it seems, opens a door into the form- 
less and uneasy world of speculation, of questions 
that have no answer, convincing me of ignorance 
and doubt, bidding me beat in vain against the bars 
that hem me in. Why should I crave thus for cer- 
tainty, for strength? Answer me, happy bird! 



40 The Thread of Gold 

Nay, you guard your secret. Softer and more dis- 
tant sound the sweet notes, warning me to rest and 
believe, telling me to wait and hope. 

But one further thought! One is expected, by 
people of conventional or orthodox minds, to base 
one's conceptions of God on the writings of frail 
and fallible men, and to accept their slender and 
eager testimony to the occurrence of abnormal 
events as the best revelation of God that the world 
contains. And all the while we disregard his own 
patient writing upon the wall. Every day and 
every hour we are confronted with strange marvels, 
which we dismiss from our minds because, God for- 
give us, we call them natural; and yet they take us 
back, by a ladder of immeasurable antiquity, to ages 
before man had emerged from a savage state. Cen- 
turies before our rude forefathers had learned even 
to scratch a few hillocks into earthworks, while they 
lived a brutish life, herding in dens and caves, the 
cuckoo, with her traditions faultlessly defined, was 
paying her annual visits, fluting about the forest 
glades, and searching for nests into which to in- 
trude her speckled egg. The patient witness of 
God ! She is as direct a revelation of the Creator's 
mind, could we but interpret the mystery of her 
instincts, as Augustine himself \v\ih his scheme of 
salvation logically defined. Each of these mis- 
sions, whether of bird or man, a wonder and a mar- 



The Cuckoo 41 

vel! But do we not tend to accept the eager and 
childish hopes of humanity, arrayed with bhthe cer- 
tainty, as a nearer evidence of the mind of God 
than the bird that at his bidding pursues her an- 
nual quest, unaffected by our hasty conclusions, 
unmoved by our glorified visions? I have some- 
times thought that Christ probably spoke more 
than is recorded about the observation of Nature; 
the hearts of those that heard him were so set on 
temporal ends and human applications, that they 
had not perhaps leisure or capacity to recollect 
aught but those few scattered words, that seem to 
speak of a deep love for and insight into the things 
of earth. They remembered better that Christ 
blasted a fig-tree for not doing what the Father bade 
the poor plant do, than his tender dwelling upon 
grasses and lilies, sparrow and sheep. The with- 
ering of the tree made an allegory : while the love of 
flowers and streams was to those simple hearts per- 
haps an unaccountable, almost an eccentric thing. 
But had Christ drawn human breath in our bleaker 
Northern air, he would have perhaps, if those that 
surrounded him had had leisure and grace to listen, 
drawn as grave and comforting a soul-music from 
our homely cuckoo, wdth her punctual obedience, 
her unquestioning faith, as he did from the birds 
and flowers of the hot hillsides, the pastoral valleys 
of Palestine. I am sure he would have loved the 



42 The Thread of Gold 

cuckoo, and forgiven her her heartless customs. 
Those that sing so deHcately would not have leisure 
and courage to make their music so soft and sweet, 
if they had not a hard heart to turn to the sorrows 
of the world. 

Yet still I am no nearer the secret. God sends 
me, here the frozen peak, there the blue sea; here 
the tiger, there the cuckoo; here Virgil, there 
Jeremiah; here St. Francis of Assisi, there Napo- 
leon. And all the while, as he pushes his fair or 
hurtful toys upon the stage, not a whisper, not a 
smile, not a glance escapes him; he thrusts them on, 
he lays them by; but the interpretation he leaves 
with us, and there is never a word out of the silence 
to show us whether we have guessed aright. 

VIII 

Yesteeday was a day of brisk airs. The wind 
was at work brushing great inky clouds out of the 
sky. They came sailing up, those great rounded 
masses of dark vapour, like huge galleons driving 
to the West, spilling their freight as they came. 
The air would be suddenly full of tall twisted rain- 
streaks, and then would come a bright burst of the 
sun. 

But a secret change came in the night; some 
silent power filled the air with warmth and balm. 



Spring-Time 43 

And to-day, when I walked out of the town with 
an old and familiar friend, the spring had come. 
A maple had broken into bloom and leaf; a chest- 
nut was unfolding his gummy buds; the cottage 
gardens were full of squills and hepatica; and the 
mezereons were all thick with damask buds. In 
green and sheltered underwoods there were bursts 
of daffodils ; hedges were pricked with green points ; 
and a delicate green tapestry was beginning to 
weave itself over the roadside ditches. 

The air seemed full of a deep content. Birds 
fluted softly, and the high elms which stirred in 
the wandering breezes were all thick with their red 
buds. There was so much to look at and to point 
out that we talked but fitfully; and there was, 
too, a gentle languor abroad which made us con- 
tent to be silent. 

In one village which we passed, a music-loving 
squire had made a concert for his friends and neigh- 
bours, and doubtless, too, for our vagrant delight; 
we stood uninvited to listen to a tuneful stir of vio- 
lins, which with a violoncello booming beneath, 
broke out very pleasantly from the windows of a 
village school-room. 

When body and mind are fresh and vigorous, 
these outside impressions often lose, I think, their 
sharp savours. One is preoccupied with one's own 
happy schemes and merry visions; the bird sings 



44 The Thread of Gold 

shrill within its cage, and claps its golden wings. 
But on such soft and languorous days as these days 
of early spring, when the body is unstrung, and the 
bonds and ties that fasten the soul to its prison are 
loosened and unbound, the spirit, sti'iving to be 
glad, draws in through the passages of sense these 
swift impressions of beauty, as a thirsty child 
drains a cup of spring-water on a sun-scorched 
day, lingering over the limpid freshness of the glid- 
ing element. The airy voices of the strings being 
stilled, with a sort of pity for those penned in the 
crowded room, interchanging the worn coinage of 
civility, we stood a while looking in at a gate, 
through which we could see the cool front of a 
Georgian manor-house, built of dusky bricks, with 
coigns and dressings of grey stone. The dark 
windows with their thick white casements, the 
round-topped dormers, the steps up to the door, 
and a prim circle of grass which seemed to lie like 
a carpet on the pale gravel, gave the feeling of a 
picture ; the whole being framed in the sombre yews 
of shrubberies which bordered the drive. It was 
hard to feel that the quiet house was the scene of a 
real and active life; it seemed so full of a slumber- 
ous peace, and to be tenanted only by soft shadows 
of the past. And so we went slowly on by the huge 
white-boarded mill, its cracks streaming with 
congealed dust of wheat, where the water thun- 



Spring-Time 45 

dered through the sluices and the gear rattled 
within. 

We crossed the bridge, and walked on by a field- 
track that skirted the edge of the wold. How thin 
and clean were the tints of the dry ploughlands and 
the long sweep of pasture! Presently we were at 
the foot of a green drift-road, an old Roman high- 
way that ran straight up into the downs. On such 
a day as this, one follows a spirit in one's feet, as 
Shelley said; and we struck up into the wold, on 
the green road, with its thorn-thickets, until the 
chalk began to show white among the ruts ; and we 
were soon at the top. A little to the left of us ap- 
peared, in the middle of the pasture, a tiny round- 
topped tumulus that I had often seen from a lower 
road, but never visited. It was fresher and cooler 
up here. On arriving at the place we found that 
it was not a tumulus at all, but a little out- 
crop of the pure chalk. It had steep, scarped 
sides with traces of caves scooped in them. The 
grassy top commanded a wide view of wold and 
plain. 

Our talk wandered over many things, but here, 
I do not know why, we were speaking of the taking 
up of old friendships, and the comfort and delight 
of those serene and undisturbed relations which one 
sometimes establishes with a congenial person, 
which no lapse of time or lack of communication 



46 The Thread of Gold 

seems to interrupt — the best kind of friendship. 
There is here no blaming of conditions that may 
keep the two Hves apart; no feverish attempt to 
keep up the relation, no resentment if mutual in- 
tercourse dies away. And then, perhaps, in the 
shifting of conditions, one's life is again brought 
near to the life of one's friend, and the old easy in- 
tercourse is greatly resumed. ]My companion said 
that such a relation seemed to him to lie as near to 
the solution of the question of the preservation of 
identity after death as any other phenomenon of 
life. " Supposing," he said, " that such a friend- 
ship as that of which we have spoken is resumed 
after a break of twenty years. One is in no respect 
the same person; one looks different, one's views of 
life have altered, and physiologists tell us that one's 
body has changed perhaps three times over, in the 
time so that there is not a particle of our frame that 
is the same ; and yet the emotion, the feeling of the 
friendship remains, and remains unaltered. If the 
stuff of our thoughts were to alter as the materials 
of our body alter, the continuity of such an emotion 
would be impossible. Of course it is difficult to 
see how, divested of the body, our perceptions can 
continue; but almost the only thing we are really 
conscious of is our own identity, our sharp separa- 
tion from the mass of phenomena that are not our- 
selves. And, if an emotion can survive the trans- 



Spring-Time 47 

mutation of the entire frame, may it not also sur- 
vive the dissolution of that frame? " 

"Could it be thus?" I said. "A ray of light 
falls through a chink in a shutter; through the ray^ 
as we watch it, floats an infinite array of tiny 
motes, and it is through the striking of the light 
upon them that we are aware of the light ; but they 
are never the same. Yet the ray has a seeming 
identity, though even the very rijDples of light that 
cause it are themselves ever changing, ever renewed. 
Could not the soul be such a ray, illuminating the 
atoms that pass through it, and itself a perpetual 
motion, a constant renewal? " 

But the day warned us to descend. The shad- 
ows grew longer, and a great pale light of sunset 
began to gather in the West. We came slowly 
down through the pastures, till we joined the famil- 
iar road again. And at last we parted, in that wist- 
ful silence that falls upon the mood when two spirits 
have achieved a certain nearness of thought, have 
drawn as close as the strange fence of identity al- 
lows. But as I went home, I stood for a moment 
at the edge of a pleasant grove, an outlying 
pleasaunce of a great house on the verge of the 
town. The trees grew straight and tall within it, 
and all the underwood was full of spring flowers 
and green ground-plants, expanding to light and 
warmth; the sky was all full of light, dying away 



48 The Thread of Gold 

to a calm and liquid green, the colour of peace. 
Here I encountered another friend, a retiring man 
of letters, who lives apart from the world in dreams 
of his own. He is a bright-eyed, eager creature, 
tall and shadoA\y, who has but a slight hold upon 
the world. We talked for a few moments of triv- 
ial things, till a chance question of mine drew from 
him a sad statement of his own health. He had 
been lately, he said, to a physician, and had been 
warned that he was in a somewhat precarious con- 
dition. I tried to comfort him, but he shook his 
head; and though he tried to speak lightly and 
cheerfully, I could see that there was a shadow of 
doom upon him. 

As I turned to go, he held up his hand, " Listen 
to the birds! " he said. We were silent, and could 
hear the clear flute-like notes of thrushes hidden in 
the tall trees, and the soft cooing of a dove. " That 
gives one," he said, " some sense of the happiness 
which one cannot capture for oneself!" He 
smiled mournfully, and in a moment I saw his light 
figure receding among the trees. What a world it 
is for sorrow! ]My friend was going, bearing the 
burden of a lonely grief, which I could not lighten 
for him; and yet the whole scene was full of so 
sweet a content, the birds full of hope and delight, 
the flowers and leaves glad to feel themselves alive. 
What was one to make of it all? Where to turn 



Spring-Time 49 

for light? What conceivable benefit could result 
from thus perpetually desiring to know, and per- 
petually being baffled ? 

Yet, after all, to-day has been one of those rare 
days, Hke the gold sifted from the debris of the 
mine, which has had for me, by some subtle alchemy 
of the spirit, the permanent quality which is often 
denied to more stirring incidents and livelier ex- 
periences. I had seen the mysteries of life and 
death, of joy and sorrow, sharply and sadly con- 
trasted. I had been one with Nature, with all her 
ardent ecstasies, her vital impulses and then I had 
seen too the other side of the picture, a soul con- 
fronted with the mystery of death, alone in the 
shapeless gloom; the very cries and stirrings and 
joyful dreams of Nature bringing no help, but only 
deepening the shadow. 

And there came too the thought of how little 
such easy speculations as we had indulged in on the 
grassy mound, thoughts which seemed so radiant 
with beauty and mystery, how little they could sus- 
tain or comfort the sad spirit which had entered into 
the cloud. 

So that bright first day of spring shaped itself 
for me into a day when not only the innocent and 
beautiful flowers of the world rose into life and sun- 
shine; but a day when sadder thoughts raised their 
head too, red flowers of suffering, and pale blooms 
4 



50 The Thre^vd of Gold 

of sadness ; and yet these too can be v,'oven into the 
spirit's coronal, I doubt not, if one can but find 
heart to do it, and patience for the sorrowful task. 



IX 



I HAVE just read a story that has moved me 
strangely, with a helpless bewilderment and a sad 
anger of mind. When the doors of a factory, in 
the heart of a northern town, were opened one 
morning, a workman, going to move a barrel that 
stood in a corner, saw something crouching behind 
it that he believed to be a dog or cat. He pushed 
it with his foot, and a large hare sprang out. I 
suppose that the poor creature had been probably 
startled by some dog the evening before, in a field 
close to the town, had fled in the twilight along the 
streets, frightened and bewildered, and had slipped 
into the first place of refuge it had found ; had per- 
haps explored its prison in vain, when the doors 
were shut, with many dreary perambulations, and 
had then sunk into an uneasy sleep, with frequent 
timid awakenings, in the terrifying unfamiliar 
place. 

The man who had disturbed it shouted aloud to 
the other workmen who were entering; the doors 
were shut, and the hare was chased by an eager and 



The Hare 51 

excited throng from corner to corner ; it fled behind 
some planks ; the planks were taken up ; it made, in 
its agony of fear, a great leap over the men who 
were bending down to catch it; it rushed into a 
corner behind some tanks, from which it was dis- 
lodged with a stick. For half an hour the chase 
continued, until at last it was headed into a work- 
room, where it relinquished hope ; it crouched pant- 
ing, with its long ears laid back, its pretty brown 
eyes wide open, as though wondering desperately 
what it had done to deserve such usage ; until it was 
despatched with a shower of blows, and the limp, 
bleeding body handed over to its original discoverer. 
Not a soul there had a single thought of pity for 
the creature; they went back to work pleased, ex- 
cited, amused. It was a good story to tell for a 
week, and the man who had struck the last blows 
became a little hero for his deftness. The old sav- 
age instinct for prey had swept fiercely up from the 
bottom of these rough hearts — hearts capable, too, 
of tenderness and grief, of compassion for suffer- 
ing, gentle with women and children. It seems to 
be impossible to blame them, and such blame would 
have been looked upon as silly and misplaced senti- 
ment. Probably not even an offer of money, far 
in excess of the market value of the dead body, if 
the hare could be caught unharmed, would have pre- 
vailed at the moment over the instinct for blood. 



52 The Thread of Gold 

There are many hares in the world, no doubt, and 
nous sommes tous condamnes. But that the power 
which could call into being so harmless, pretty, and 
delicately organised a creature does not care or is 
unable to protect it better, is a strange mystery. It 
cannot be supposed that the hare's innocent life de- 
served such chastisement; and it is difficult to be- 
lieve that suffering, helplessly endured at one point 
of the creation, can be remedial at another. Yet 
one cannot bear to think that the extremity of terror 
and pain, thus borne by a sensitive creature, either 
comes of neglect, or of cruel purpose, or is merely 
wasted. And yet the chase and the slaughter of 
the unhappy thing cannot be anything but debas- 
ing to those who took part in it. And at the same 
time, to be angry and sorry over so wretched an 
episode seems like trying to be wiser than the mind 
that made us. What single gleam of brightness 
is it possible to extract from the pitiful little story? 
Only this: that there must lie some tender secret, 
not only behind what seems a deed of unnecessary 
cruelty, but in the implanting in us of the instinct 
to grieve with a miserable indignation over a thing 
we cannot cure, and even in the withholding from 
us any hope that might hint at the solution of the 
mystery. 

But the thought of the seemly fur stained and 
bedabbled, the bright hazel eyes troubled with the 



The Diplodocus 53 

fear of death, the silky ears, in which rang the hor- 
rid din of pursuit, rises before me as I write, and 
casts me back into the sad mood, that makes one 
feel that the closer that one gazes into the sorrow- 
ful texture of the world, the more glad we may well 
be to depart. 



X 



I HA YE had my imagination deeply thrilled lately 
by reading about the discovery in America of the 
bones of a fossil animal called the Diplodocus. I 
hardly know what the word is derived from, but it 
might possibly mean an animal which takes twice as 
much, of nourishment, perhaps, or room; either 
twice as much as is good for it, or twice as much as 
any other animal. In either case it seems a felicit- 
ous description. The creature was a reptile, a 
gigantic toad or lizard that lived, it is calculated, 
about three million years ago. It was in Canada 
that this particular creature lived. The earth was 
then a far hotter place than now ; a terrible, steam- 
ing swamp, full of rank and luxuriant vegetation, 
gigantic palms, ferns as big as trees. The diplodo- 
cus was upwards of a hundred feet long, a vast 
inert creature, with a tough black hide. In spite of 
its enormous bulk its brain was only the size of a 



54 The Thread of Gold 

pigeon's egg, so that its mental processes must 
have been of the simplest. It had a big mouth full 
of rudimentary teeth, of no use to masticate its 
food, but just sufficing to crop the luxuriant juicy 
vegetable stalks on which it lived, and of which it 
ate in the course of the day as much as a small hay- 
rick would contain. The poisonous swamps in 
which it crept can seldom have seen the light of day ; 
perpetual and appalling torrents of rain must have 
raged there, steaming and dripping through the 
dim and monstrous forests, with their fallen day, 
varied by long periods of fiery tropical sunshine. 
In this hot gloom the diplodocus trailed itself about, 
eating, eating ; living a century or so ; loving, as far 
as a brain the size of a pigeon's egg can love, and 
no doubt with a maternal tenderness for its loathly 
offspring. It had but few foes, though, in the 
course of endless generations, there sprang up a 
carnivorous race of creatures which seem to have 
found the diplodocus tender eating. The particu- 
lar diplodocus of which I speak probably died of 
old age in the act of drinking, and was engulfed in 
a pool of the great, curdling, reedy river that ran 
lazily through the forest. The imagination sick- 
ens before the thought of the speedy putrefaction 
of such a beast under such conditions; but this pro- 
cess over, the creature's bones lay deep in the pool. 
Another feature of the earth at that date must 



The Diplodocus 55 

have been the vast volcanic agencies at work ; whole 
continents were at intervals submerged or uplifted. 
In this case the whole of the forest country, where 
the diplodocus lay, was submerged beneath the sea, 
and sank to a depth of several leagues; for, in the 
course of countless ages, sea-ooze, to a depth of at 
least three miles, was deposited over the forest, pre- 
serving the trunks and even the very sprays of the 
tropical vegetation. Who would suppose that the 
secret history of this great beast would ever be re- 
vealed, as it lay century after century beneath the 
sea-floor? But another convulsion took place, and 
a huge ridge of country, forming the rocky back- 
bone of North and South America, was thrust up 
again by a volcanic convulsion, so that the diplodo- 
cus now lay a mile above the sea, with a vast pile 
of downs over his head which became a huge range 
of snow mountains. Then the rain and the sun 
began their work ; and the whole of the immense bed 
of uplifted ocean-silt, now become chalk, was car- 
ried eastward by mighty rivers, forming the whole 
continent of North America, between these moun- 
tains and the eastern sea. At last the tropic forest 
was revealed again, a wide tract of petrified tree- 
trunks and fossil wood. And then out of an ex- 
cavation, made where one of the last patches of the 
chalk still lay in a rift of the hills, where the old 
river-pool had been into which the great beast had 



56 The Thread of Gold 

sunk, was dug the neckbone of the creature. Curi- 
osity was aroused by the sight of this fragment of 
an unknown animal, and bit by bit the great bones 
came to light; some portions were missing, but 
further search revealed the remains of three other 
specimens of the great lizard, and a complete skele- 
ton was put together. 

The mind positively reels before the story that 
is here revealed; we, who are feebly accustomed to 
regard the course of recorded history as the cru- 
cial and critical period of the life of the world, must 
be sobered by the reflection that the whole of the 
known history of the human race is not the thous- 
andth, nor the ten-thousandth part of the history 
of the planet. What does this vast and incredible 
panorama mean to us ? What is it all about ? This 
ghastly force at work, dealing with life and death 
on so incredible a scale, and yet guarding its secret 
so close? The diplodocus, I imagine, seldom in- 
dulged in reveries as to how it came to be there; it 
awoke to life ; its business was to crawl about in the 
hot gloom, to eat, and drink, and sleep, to propa- 
gate its kind ; and not the least amazing part of the 
history is that at length should have arisen a race 
of creatures, human beings, that should be able to 
reconstruct, however faintly, by investigation, 
imagination, and deduction, a picture of the dead 
life of the world. It is this capacity for arriving at 



The Diplodocus 57 

what has been, for tracing out the huge mystery of 
the work of God, that appears to me the most won- 
derful thing of all. And yet we seem no nearer to 
the solution of the secret; we come into the world 
with this incredible gift of placing ourselves, so 
to speak, on the side of the Creator, of surveying 
his work; and yet we cannot guess what is in his 
heart; the stern and majestic eyes of nature behold 
us stonily, permitting us to make question, to ex- 
plore, to investigate, but withholding the secret. 
And in the light of those inscrutable eyes, how 
weak and arrogant appear our dogmatic systems 
of religion, that would profess to define and read 
the very purposes of God; our dearest conceptions 
of morality, our pathetic principles, pale and fade 
before these gigantic indications of mysterious, in- 
different energy. 

Yet even here, I think, the golden thread gleams 
out in the darkness; for slight and frail as our so- 
called knowledge, our beliefs, appear, before that 
awful, accumulated testimony of the past, yet the 
latest development is none the less the instant guid- 
ing of God ; it is all as much a gift from him as the 
blind impulses of the great lizard in the dark forest ; 
and again there emerges the mighty thought, the 
only thought that can give us the peace we seek, 
that we are all in his hand, that nothing is forgot- 
ten, notliing is small or great in his sight ; and that 



58 The Thread of Gold 

each of our frail, trembling spirits has its place in 
the prodigious scheme, as much as the vast and fiery 
globe of the sun on the one hand, and, on the other, 
the smallest atom of dust that welters deep beneath 
the sea. All that is, exists; indestructible, august, 
divine, capable of endless rearrangement, infinite 
modifications, but undeniably there. 

This truth, however dimly apprehended, how- 
ever fitfully followed, ought to give us a certain 
confidence, a certain patience. In careless moods 
we may neglect it; in days of grief and pain we 
may feel that it cannot help us ; but it is the truth ; 
and the more we can make it our own, the deeper 
that we can set it in our trivial spirits, the better 
are we prepared to learn the lesson which the deep- 
est instinct of our nature bids us believe, that the 
Father is trying to teach us, or is at least willing 
that we should learn if we can. 



XI 



How strange it is that sometimes the smallest 
and commonest incident, that has befallen one a 
hundred times before, will suddenly open the door 
into that shapeless land of fruitless speculation; the 
land on to which, I think, the Star Wormwood fell. 



The Beetle 59 

burning it up and making it bitter; tbe land in 
which we most of us sometimes have to wander, 
and always alone. 

It was such a trifling thing after all. I was 
bicycling very pleasantly down a country road to- 
day, when one of those small pungent beetles, a 
tiny thing, in black plate-armour, for all the world 
like a minute torpedo, sailed straight into my eye. 
The eyelid, quicker even than my own thought, shut 
itself down, but too late. The little fellow was 
engulphed in what Walt Whitman would call the 
liquid rims. These small, hard creatures are ten- 
acious of life, and they have, moreover, the power of 
exuding a noxious secretion — an acrid oil, with a 
strong scent, and even taste, of saffron. It was all 
over in a moment. I rubbed my eye, and I sup- 
pose crushed him to death ; but I could not get him 
out, and I had no companion to extract him ; the re- 
sult was that my eye was painful and inflamed for 
an hour or two, till the tiny, black, flattened corpse 
worked its way out for itself. 

Now, that is not a very marvellous incident; but 
it set me wondering. In the first place, what a 
horrible experience for the creature; in a moment, 
as he sailed joyfully along, saying, " Aha," per- 
haps, like the war-horse among the trumpets, on 
the scented summer breeze, with the sun w^arm on 
his mail, to find himself stuck fast in a hot and oozy 



60 The Thread of Gold 

crevice, and presently to be crushed to death. His 
Httle taste of the pleasant world so soon over, and 
for me an agreeable hour spoilt, so far as I could 
see, to no particular purpose. 

Now, one is inclined to believe that such an in- 
cident is what we call fortuitous ; but the only hope 
we have in the world is to believe that things do not 
happen by chance. One believes, or tries to be- 
lieve, that the Father of all has room in his mind for 
the smallest of his creatures ; that not a sparrow, as 
Christ said, falls to the ground without his tender 
care. Theologians tell us that death entered into 
the world by sin; but it is not consistent to believe 
that, whereas both men and animals suffer and die, 
the sufferings and death of men are caused by their 
sins, or by the sins of their ancestors, while animals 
suffer and die without sin being the cause. Surely 
the cause must be the same for all the creation? 
And still less is it possible to believe that the 
suffering and death of creatures is caused by the 
sin of man, because they suffered and died for 
thousands of centuries before man came upon the 
scene. 

If God is omnipotent and all-loving, we are 
bound to believe that suffering and death are sent 
by him deliberately, and not cruelly. One single 
instance, however minute, that established the re- 
verse, would vitiate the whole theory; and if so, then 



The Beetle 61 

we are the sport of a power that is sometimes 
kind and sometimes mahgnant. An insupportable 
thought ! 

Is it possible to conceive that the law of sin 
works in the lower creation, and that they, too, are 
punished, or even wisely corrected, for sinning 
against such light as they have? Had the little 
beetle that sailed across my path acted in such a 
way that he had deserved his fate? Or was his 
death meant to make him a better, a larger-minded 
beetle? I cannot bring myself to believe that. 
Perhaps a philosophical theologian would say that 
creation was all one, and that suffering at one point 
was remedial at some other point. I am not in a 
position to deny the possibility of that, but I am 
equally unable to affirm that it is so. There is no 
evidence which would lead me to think it. It only 
seems to me necessary to affirm it, in order to con- 
firm the axiom that God is omnipotent and all- 
loving. Much in nature and in human life would 
seem to be at variance with that. 

It may be said that one is making too much of a 
minute incident; but such incidents are of hourly 
occurrence all the world over; and the only possible 
method for arriving at truth is the scientific method 
of cumulative evidence. The beetle was small, in- 
deed, and infinitely unimportant in the scheme of 
things. But he was all in all to himself. The 



62 The Thread of Gold 

world only existed so far as he was concerned 
through his tiny consciousness. 

The old-fashioned religious philosophers held 
that man was the crown and centre of creation, and 
that God was mainly preoccupied with man's des- 
tiny. They maintained that all creatures were 
given us for our use and enjoyment. The enjoy- 
ment that I derived from the beetle, in this case, 
was not conspicuous. But I suppose that such 
cheerful optimists would say that the beetle was 
sent to give me a little lesson in patience, to teach 
me not to think so much about myself. But, as a 
matter of fact, the little pain I suffered made me 
think more of myself than I had previously been 
doing; it turned me for the time from a bland and 
hedonistic philosopher into a petulant pessimist, be- 
cause it seemed that no one was the better for the 
incident; certainly, if life is worth having at all, 
the beetle was no better off, and in my own case I 
could trace no moral improvement. I had been 
harmlessly enough employed in getting air and 
exercise in the middle of hard work. It was no 
vicious enjoyment that was temporarily suspended. 

Again, there are people who would say that to 
indulge in such reveries is morbid; that one must 
take the rough with the smooth, and not trouble 
about beetles or inflamed eyes. But if one is 
haunted by the hopeless desire to search out the 



The Beetle 63 

causes of things, such arguments do not assist one. 
Such people would say, " Oh, you must take a 
larger or wider view of it all, and not strain at 
gnats ! " But the essence of God's omnipotence 
is, that while he can take the infinitely wide view of 
all created things, he can also take, I would fain 
believe, the infinitely just and minute point of view, 
and see the case from the standpoint of the smallest 
of his creatures! 

What, then, is my solution? That is the melan- 
choly part if it ; I am not prepared to offer one. I 
am met on every side by hopeless difficulties. I am 
tempted to think that God is not at all what we 
imagine him to be; that our conceptions of bene- 
volence and justice and love are not necessarily true 
of him at all. That he is not in the least like our 
conceptions of him; that he has no particular ten- 
derness about suffering, no particular care for ani- 
mal life. Nature would seem to prove that at every 
turn; and yet, if it be true, it leaves me struggling 
in a sad abj^ss of thought; it substitutes for our 
grave, beautiful, and hopeful conceptions of God 
a kind of black mystery which, I confess, lies very 
heavy on the heart, and seems to make effort vain. 

And thus I fall back again upon faith and hope. 
I know that I wish all things well, that I desire 
with all my heart that everything that breathes and 
moves should be happy and joyful; and I cannot 



64 The Thread of Gold 

believe in my heart that it is different with God. 
And thus I rest in the trust that there is some- 
where, far-off, a beauty and a joy in suffering; and 
that, perhaps, death itself is a fair and a desirable 
thing. 

As I rode to-day in the summer sun, far-off, 
through the haze, I could see the huge Cathedral 
towers and portals looming up over the trees. 
Even so might be the gate of death! As we fare 
upon our pilgrimage, that shadowy doorway waits, 
silent and sombre, to receive us. That gate, the 
gate of death, seems to me, as in strength and health 
I sweep along the pleasant road of life, a terrible, 
an appalling place. But shall I feel so, when in- 
deed I tread the threshold, and see the dark arches, 
the mysterious windows to left and right? It may 
prove a cool and secure haven of beauty and re- 
freshment, rich in memory, echoing with melodious 
song. The poor beetle knows about it now, what- 
ever it is; he is wise with the eternal wisdom of all 
that have entered in, leaving behind them the frail 
and delicate tabernacle, in which the spirit dwelt, 
and which is so soon to moulder into dust. 

XII 

There is a big farmyard close to the house where 
I am staying just now; it is a constant pleasure, as 



The Farm- yard 65 

I pass that way, to stop and watch the manners and 
customs of the beasts and birds that inhabit it; I 
am ashamed to think how much time I spend in 
hanging over a gate, to watch the httle dramas of 
the byre. I am not sure that pigs are an altogether 
satisfactory subject of contemplation. They al- 
ways seem to me like a fallen race that has seen bet- 
ter days. They are able, intellectual, inquisitive 
creatures. When they are driven from place to 
place, they are not gentle or meek, like cows and 
sheep, who follow the line of least resistance. The 
pig is suspicious and cautious ; he is sure that there 
is some uncomfortable plot on foot, not wholly for 
his good, which he must try to thwart if he can. 
Then, too, he never seems quite at home in his de- 
plorably filthy surroundings; he looks at you, up 
to the knees in ooze, out of his little eyes, as if he 
would live in a more cleanly way, if he were per- 
mitted. Pigs always remind me of the mariners of 
Homer, who were transformed by Circe; there is a 
dreadful humanity about them, as if they were try- 
ing to endure their base conditions philosophically, 
waiting for their release. 

But cows bring a deep tranquillity into the spirit ; 
their glossy skins, their fragrant breath, their con- 
tented ease, their mild gaze, their Epicurean rumin- 
ation tend to restore the balance of the mind, and 
make one feel that vegetarianism must be a 
5 



66 The Thread of Gold 

desirable thing. There is the dignity of innocence 
about the cow, and I often wish that she did not 
bear so poor a name, a word so unsuitable for 
poetry; it is lamentable that one has to take refuge 
in the archaism of kine^ when the thing itself is so 
gentle and pleasant. 

But the true joy of the farm-yard is, undoubtedly, 
in the domestic fowls. It is long since I was 
frightened of turkeys; but I confess that there is 
still something awe-inspiring about an old turkey- 
cock, with a proud and angry eye, holding his 
breath till his wattles are blue and swollen, with his 
fan extended, like a galleon in full sail, his wings 
held stiffly down, strutting a few rapid steps, and 
then slowly revolving, like a king in royal robes. 
There is something tremendous about his suprem- 
acy, his almost intolerable pride and glory. 

And then we come to cocks and hens. The 
farm-yard cock is an incredibly grotesque creature. 
His furious eye, his blood-red crest, make him look 
as if he were seeking whom he might devour. But 
he is the most craven of creatures. In spite of his 
air of just anger, he has no dignit}^ whatever. To 
hear him raise his voice, you would think that he 
was challenging the whole world to combat. He 
screams defiance, and when he has done, he looks 
round with an air of satisfaction. " There! that is 
what you have to expect if you interfere with me I " 



The Farm-yaed 67 

he seems to say. But an alarm is given; the poul- 
try seek refuge in a hurried flight. Where is the 
champion? You would expect to see him guard- 
ing the rear, menacing his pursuer; but no, he has 
headed the flight, he is far away, leading the van 
with a desperate intentness. 

This morning I was watching the behaviour of 
a party of fowls, who were sitting together on a 
dusty ledge above the road, sheltering from the 
wind. I do not know whether they meant to be as 
humorous as they were, but I can hardly think they 
were not amused at each other. They stood and 
lay very close together, with fierce glances, and 
quick, jerky motions of the head. Now and then 
one, tired of inaction, raised a deliberate claw, bowed 
its head, scratched with incredible rapidity, shook 
its tumbled feathers, and looked round with angry 
self -consciousness, as though to say: "I will ask 
any one to think me absurd at his peril." Now and 
then one of them kicked diligently at the soil, and 
then, turning round, scrutinised the place intently, 
and picked delicately at some minute object. One 
examined the neck of her neighbour with a fixed 
stare, and then pecked the spot sharply. One set- 
tled down on the dust, and gave a few vigorous 
strokes with her legs to make herself more comfort- 
able. Occasionally they all crooned and wailed to- 
gether, and at the passing of a cart all stood up 



68 The Thread of Gold 

defiantlj^ as if intending to hold their fort at all 
hazards. Presently a woman came out of a house- 
door opposite, at which the whole party ran furi- 
ously and breathlessly across the road, as if their 
lives depended upon arriving in time. There was 
not a gesture or a motion that was not admirably 
conceived, intensely dramatic. 

Again, what is more delightfully absurd than to 
see a hen find a large morsel which she cannot deal 
with at one gulp? She has no sense of diplomacy 
or cunning; her friends, attracted by her motions, 
close in about her; she picks up the treasured pro- 
vender, she runs, bewildered with anxiety, till she 
has distanced her pursuers; she puts the object down 
and takes a couple of desperate pecks; but her kin 
are at her heels ; another flight follows, another wild 
attempt; for half an hour the same tactics are pur- 
sued. At last she is at bay; she makes one pro- 
digious effort, and gets the treasure down with 
a convulsive swallow; you see her neck bulge with 
the moving object; while she looks at her baffled 
companions with an air of meek triumph. 

Ducks, too, afford many simple joys to the con- 
templative mind. A slow procession of white 
ducks, walking delicately, with heads hfted high 
and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an 
ecclesiastical procession. The singers go before, 
the minstrels follow after. There is something 



The Farm-yard 69 

liturgical, too, in the way in which, as if by a pre- 
concerted signal, they all cry out together, stand- 
ing in a group, with a burst of hoarse cheering, 
cut off suddenly by an intolerable silence. The 
arrival of ducks upon the scene, when the fowls are 
fed, is an impressive sight. They stamp wildly 
over the pasture, falling, stumbling, rising again, 
arrive on the scene with a desperate intentness, and 
eat as though they had not seen food for months. 

The pleasure of these farm-yard sights is two- 
fold. It is partly the sense of grave, unconscious 
importance about the whole business, serious lives 
lived with such whole-hearted zeal. There is no 
sense of divided endeavour; the discovery of food 
is the one thing in the world, and the sense of re- 
pletion is also the sense of virtue. But there is 
something pathetic, too, about the taming to our 
own ends of these forest beasts, these woodland 
birds ; they are so unconscious of the sad reasons for 
which we desire their company, so unsuspicious, so 
serene! Instead of learning by the sorrowful ex- 
perience of generations what our dark purposes are, 
they become more and more fraternal, more and 
more dependent. And yet how little we really 
know what their thoughts are. They are so unin- 
telligent in some regions, so subtly wise in others. 
We cannot share our thoughts with them; we can- 
not explain anything to them. We can sympathise 



70 The Thread of Gold 

with them in their troubles, but cannot convey our 
sympathy to them. There is a httle bantam hen 
here, a great pet, who comes up to the front door 
with the other bantams to be fed. She has been 
suffering for some time from an obscure illness. 
She arrives with the others, full of excitement, and 
begins to pick at the grain thrown them; but the 
effort soon exhausts her; she goes sadly apart, and 
sits with dim eye and ruffled plumage, in silent suf- 
fering, wondering, perhaps, wliy she is not as brisk 
and joyful as ever, what is the sad thing that has 
befallen her. And one can do nothing, express 
nothing of the pathetic sorrow that fills one's mind. 
But, none the less, one tries to believe, to feel, that 
this suffering is not fortuitous, is not wasted — how 
could one endure the thought otherwise, if one did 
not hope that " the earnest expectation of the 
creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons 
of God I" 

XIII 

I HAVE been reading with much emotion the life 
of a great artist. It is a tender, devoted record; 
and there is an atmosphere of delicate beauty about 
the style. It is as though his wife, who wrote the 
book, had gained through the years of companion- 
ship, a pale, pure reflection of her husband's simple 



The Artist 71 

and impassioned style, just as the moon's clear, cold 
light is drawn from the hot fountains of the sun. 
And yet, there is an individuality about the style, 
and the reflection is rather of the same nature as the 
patient likeness of exj^ression which is to be seen in 
the faces of an aged pair, who have travelled in love 
and unity down the vale of years together. 

In this artist's own writing, which has a pure and 
almost childlike naivete of phrasing, there is a glow, 
not of rhetoric or language, but of emotion, an al- 
most lover-like attitude towards his friends, which 
is yet saved from sentimentality by an obvious 
sincerity of feeling. In this he seems to me to be dif- 
ferent from the majority of artistic natures and tem- 
peraments. It is impossible not to feel, as a rule, 
when one is brought into contact with an artistic 
temperament, that the basis of it is a kind of hard- 
ness, a fanaticism of spirit. There is, of course, in 
the artistic temperament, an abundance of sensi- 
tiveness which is often mistaken for feeling. But 
it is not generally an unselfish devotion, which de- 
sires to give, to lavish, to make sacrifices for the 
sake of the beloved. It is, after all, impossible to 
serve two masters; and in the highly developed 
artist, the central passion is the devotion to art, and 
sins against art are the cardinal and unpardonable 
sins. The artist has an eager thirst for beautiful 
impressions, and his deepest concern is how to 



72 The Thread of Gold 

translate these impressions into the medium in 
which he works. INIany an artist has desired and 
craved for love. But even love in the artist is not 
the end ; love only ministers to the sacred fire of art, 
and is treated by him as a costly and precious fuel, 
which he is bound to use to feed the central flame. 
If one examines the records of great artistic careers, 
this will, I think, be found to be a true principle; 
and it is, after all, inevitable that it should be so, 
in the case of a nature which has the absorbing de- 
sire for self-expression. Perhaps, it is not always 
consciously recognised by the artist, but the fact 
is there ; he tends to regard the deepest and highest 
experiences of life as ministering to the fulness of 
his nature. I remember hearing a great master of 
musical art discussing the music of a young man of 
extraordinary promise; he said: "Yes, it is very 
beautiful, very pure ; he is perfect in technique and 
expression, as far as it goes; but it is incomplete 
and undeveloped. What he wants is to fall in love." 
A man who is not bound by the noble thraldom 
of art, who is full of vitality and emotion, but yet 
without the imperative desire for self-expression, 
regards life in a different mood. He may be fully 
as eager to absorb beautiful impressions, he may 
love the face of the earth, the glories of hill and 
plain, the sweet dreams of art, the lingering 
cadences of music; but he takes them as a child 



The Artist 73 

takes food, with a direct and eager appetite, with- 
out any impulse to dip them in his own personahty, 
or to find an expression for them. The point for 
him is not how they strike him and affect him, but 
that they are there. Such a man will perhaps find 
his deepest experience in the mysteries of human 
relationship; and he will so desire the happiness of 
those he loves, that he will lose himself in efforts 
to remove obstacles, to lighten burdens, to give 
rather than to receive joy. And this, I think, is 
probably the reason why so few women, even those 
possessed of the most sensitive perception and ap- 
prehension, achieve the highest triumphs of art ; be- 
cause they cannot so subordinate life to art, because 
they have a passionate desire for the happiness of 
others, and find their deepest satisfaction in help- 
ing to further it. Who does not know instances of 
women of high possibilities, who have quietly sacri- 
ficed the pursuit of their own accomplishments to 
the tendance of some brilliant self-absorbed artist? 
With such love is often mingled a tender compas- 
sionateness, as of a mother for a high-spirited and 
eager child, who throws herself with perfect sym- 
pathy into his aims and tastes, while all the time 
there sits a gentle knowledge in the background of 
her heart, of the essential unimportance of the 
things that the child desires so eagerly, and which 
she yet desires so whole-heartedly for him. Women 



74 The TnRiLiD of Gold 

who have made such a sacrifice do it with no 
feeling that they are resigning the best for the sec- 
ond best, but because they have a knowledge of 
mysteries that are even higher than the mysteries 
of art; and they have their reward, not in the con- 
templation of the sacrifice that they have made, but 
in having desired and attained something that is 
more beautiful still than any dream that the artist 
cherishes and follows. 

Yet the fact remains that it is useless to preach 
to the artist the mystery that there is a higher region 
than the region of art. A man must aim at the best 
that he can conceive; and it is not possible to give 
men higher motives by removing the lower motives 
that they can comprehend. Such an attempt is like 
building without foundations; and those who have 
relations with artists should do all they can to en- 
courage them to aim at what they feel to be the 
highest. 

But on the other hand, it is a duty for the artist to 
keep his heart open, if he can, to the higher influen- 
ces. He must remember, that though the eye can see 
certain colours, and the ear hear certain vibrations 
of sound, yet there is an infinite scale of colour, and 
an infinite gradation of sound, both above and be- 
low what the eye and the ear can apprehend, and 
that mortal apprehension can only appropriate to 
itself but a tiny fragment of the huge gamut. He 



Young Love 75 

ought to believe that if he is faithful to the best 
that he can apprehend, a door may be opened to 
him which may lead him into regions which are at 
present closed to him. To accept the artistic con- 
science, the artistic aim, as the highest ideal of 
which the spirit is capable, is to be a Pharisee in art, 
to be self-sufficient, arrogant, limited. It is a kind 
of spiritual pride, a wilful deafness to more remote 
voices; and it is thus of all sins, the one which the 
artist, who lives the life of perception, whose mind 
must, above all things, be open and transparent, 
should be loth to commit. He should rather keep 
his inner eye — for the artist is like the great creat- 
ures that, in the prophet's vision, stood nearest to 
the presence, who were full of eyes, without and 
within — open to the unwonted apparition which 
may, suddenly, like a meteor of the night, sail across 
the silent heaven. It may be that, in some moment 
of fuller percej)tion, he may even have to divorce 
the sweeter and more subtle mistress in exchange 
for one who comes in a homelier guise, and take the 
beggar girl for his queen. But the abnegation 
will be no sacrifice ; rather a richer and livelier hope. 

XIV 

We had a charming idyll here to-day. A young 
husband and wife came to stay with us in all the 



76 The Thre^u) of Gold 

first flush of married happiness. One reahsed all 
day long that other people merely made a pleasant 
background for their love, and that for each there 
was but one real figure on the scene. This was 
borne witness to by a whole armoury of gentle 
looks, SMdft glances, silent gestures. They were 
both full to the brim of a delicate laughter, of over- 
brimming wonder, of tranquil desire. And we all 
took part in their gracious happiness. In the even- 
ing they sang and played to us, the wife being an 
accomplished pianist, the husband a fine singer. 
But though the glory of their art fell in rainbow 
showers on the audience, it was for each other that 
they sang and played. We sat in the dim light of 
a little panelled room, the lamps making a circle of 
light about the happy pair; seldom have I felt the 
revelation of personality more. The wife played 
to us a handful of beautiful things; but I noticed 
that she could not interpret the sadder and darker 
strains, into which the shadow and malady of a suf- 
fering spirit had passed; but into little tripping 
minuets full of laughter and light, and into melo- 
dies that spoke of a pure passion of sweetness and 
human dehght, her soul passed, till the room felt 
as though flooded with the warmth of the sun. And 
he, too, sang with all his might some joyful and 
brave utterances, with the lusty pride of manhood; 
and in a gentler love-song too, that seemed to 



Young Love 77 

linger in a dream of delight by crystal streams, the 
sweet passion of the heart rose clear and true. 
But when he too essayed a song of sorrow and re- 
luctant sadness, there was no spirit in it; it seemed 
to him, I suppose, so unlike life, and the joy of 
life, — so fantastic and unreal an outpouring of the 
heart. 

We sat long in the panelled room, till it seemed 
all alive with soft dreams and radiant shapes, that 
floated in a golden air. All that was dark and dif- 
ficult seemed cast out and exorcised. But it was all 
so sincere and contented a peace that the darker 
and more sombre shadows had no jealous awaken- 
ing; for the two were living to each other, not in a 
selfish seclusion, but as though they gave of their 
joy in handfuls to the whole world. The raptures 
of lovers sometimes take them back so far into a 
kind of unashamed childishness that the spectacle 
rouses the contempt and even the indignation of 
w^orld-worn and cynical people. But here it never 
deviated from dignity and seemliness; it only 
seemed new and true, and the best gift of God. 
These two spirits seemed, with hands interwined, 
to have ascended gladly into the mountain, and to 
have seen a transfiguration of life; which left them 
not in a blissful eminence of isolation, but rather, as 
it were beckoning others upwards, and saying that 
the road was indeed easy and plain. And so the 



78 The Thread of Gold 

sweet hour passed, and left a fragrance behind it; 
whatever might befall, they had tasted of the holy 
wine of joy; they had blessed the cup, and bidden 
us too to set our lips to it. 



XV 



I WAS w^alking one summer day in the pleasant 
hilly country near my home. There is a road which 
I often traverse, partly because it is a very lonely 
one, partly because it leads out on a high brow or 
shoulder of the uplands, and commands a wide view 
of the plain. Moreover, the road is so deeply 
sunken between steej) banks, overgrown with hazels, 
that one is hardly aware how much one climbs, and 
the wide clear view at the top always breaks upon 
the eye with a certain shock of agreeable surprise. 
A little before the top of the hill a road turns off, 
leading into a long disused quarrj^ surrounded by 
miniature cliffs, full of grassy mounds and broken 
ground, overgrown with thickets and floored with 
rough turf. It is a very enchanting place in spring, 
and indeed at all times of the year; many flowers 
grow there, and the birds sing securely among the 
bushes. I have always imagined that the Red 
Deeps in The Mill on the Floss was just such a 
place, and the scenes described as taking place there 



A Strange Gathering 79 

have alwaj^s enacted themselves for me in the 
quarry. I have always had a fancy too that if there 
are any fairies hereabouts, which I very much 
doubt, for I fear that the new villas which begin to 
be sprinkled about the countryside have scared them 
all away, they would be found here. I visited the 
place one moonlight night, and I am sure that the 
whole dingle was full of a bright alert life which 
mocked my clumsy eyes and ears. If I could have 
stolen upon the place unawares, I felt that I might 
have seen strange businesses go forward, and tiny 
revels held. 

That afternoon, as I drew near, I was displeased 
to see that my little retreat was being profaned by 
company. Some brakes were drawn up in the road, 
and I heard loud voices raised in untuneful mirth. 
As I came nearer I was much bewildered to divine 
who the visitors were. They seemed on the point 
of departing; two of the brakes were full, and into 
another some men were clambering. As I came 
close to them I was still more puzzled. The ma- 
jority of the party were dressed all alike, in rough 
brown clothes, with soft black felt hats ; but in each 
of the brakes that were tenanted sat a man as well, 
with a braided cap, in a sort of uniform. Most of 
the other men were old or elderly; some had white 
beards or whiskers, almost all were grizzled. They 
were talking, too, in an odd, inconsequent, chirping 



80 The Thread of Gold 

kind of way, not listening to each other ; and more- 
over they were strangely adorned. Some had their 
hats stuck full of flowers, others were wreathed 
with leaves. A few had chains of daisies round their 
necks. Thej^ seemed as merry and as ohedient as 
children. Inside the gate, in the centre of the 
quarry, was a still stranger scene. Here was a 
ring of elderly and aged men, their hats wreathed 
with garlands, hand-in-hand, executing a slow and 
solemn dance in a circle. One, who seemed the 
moving spirit, a small wiry man with a fresh-col- 
oured face and a long chin-beard, was leaping high 
in the air, singing some rustic song, and dragging 
his less active companions round and round. The 
others all entered into the spirit of the dance. One 
very old and feeble man, with a smile on his face, 
was executing little clumsy hops, deeply intent on 
the performance. A few others stood round ad- 
miring the sport; a little apart was a tall grave 
man, talking loudly to himself, with flowers stuck 
all over him, who was spinning round and round in 
an ecstasy of delight. Becoming giddy, he took 
a few rapid steps to the left, but fell to the ground, 
where he lay laughing softly, and moving his hands 
in the air. Presently one of the officials said a word 
to the leader of the dance; the ring broke up, and 
the performers scattered, gathering up little 
bundles of leaves and flowers that lay all about in 



A Strange Gathering 81 

some confvision, and then trooping out to the 
brakes. The quarry was deserted. Several of the 
group waved their hands to me, uttering unintelli- 
gible words, and holding out flowers. 

I was so much surj)rised at the odd scene that 
I asked one of the officials what it all meant. He 
said politely that it was a picnic party from the 

Pauper Lunatic Asylum at H . The mystery 

was explained. I said: " They seem to be enjoy- 
ing themselves." " Yes, indeed, sir," he said, 
"they are like children; they look forward to this 
all the year ; there is no greater punishment than to 
deprive a man of his outing." He entered the last 
brake as he said these words, and the carriages 
moved off, a shrill and aged cheer rising from thin 
and piping voices on the air. 

The whole thing did not strike me as grotesque, 
but as infinitely pathetic and even beautiful. Here 
were these old pitiful creatures, so deeply afflicted, 
condemned most of them to a lifelong seclusion, 
who were recalling and living over again their child- 
ish sports and delights. What dim memories of old 
spring days, before their sad disabilities had settled 
upon them, were working in those aged and feeble 
brains ! What pleased me best was the obvious and 
light-hearted happiness of the whole party, a com- 
pensation for days of starved monotony. No party 
of school-children on a holiday could have been 
6 



82 The Thre.vd of Gold 

more thoughtlessly, more intently gay. Here was 
a desolate company, one would have thought, of 
life's failures, facing one of the saddest and least 
hopeful prospects that the world can afford; yet 
on this day at least they were full to the brim of 
irresponsible and complete happiness and dehght, 
tasting an enjoyment, it seemed, more vivid than 
often falls to my own lot. In the presence of such 
happiness it seemed so useless, so unnecessary to 
ask why so heavy a burden was bound on their 
backs, because here at all events was a scene of the 
purest and most innocent rapture. I went on my 
way full of wonder and even of hope. I could not 
fathom the deep mystery of the failure, the suffer- 
ing, the w^eakness that runs across the world like an 
ugly crack across the face of a fair building. But 
then how tenderly and wisely does the great Arti- 
ficer lend consolation and healing, repairing and 
filling so far as he may, the sad fracture; he seems 
to know better than w-e can divine the things that 
belong to our peace; so that as I looked across the 
purple rolling plain, with all its wooded ridges, its 
rich pastures, the smoke going up from a hundred 
hamlets, a confidence, a quiet trust seemed to rise 
in my mind, filling me with a strange yearning to 
know what were the thoughts of the vast ]Mind that 
makes us and sustains us, mingled with a faith in 
some large and far-off issue that shall receive and 



The Cripple 83 

enfold our little fretful spirits, as the sea receives 
the troubled leaping streams, to move in slow unison 
with the wide and secret tides. 



XVI 

I WENT to-day to see an old friend whom I had 
not met for ten years. Some time ago he had a 
bad fall which for a time crippled him, but from 
which it was hoped he would recover; but he must 
have received some obscure and deep-seated injury, 
because, after improving for a time, he began to go 
backwards, and has now to a great extent lost the 
use of his limbs. He was formerly a very active 
man, both intellectually and physically. He had 
a prosperous business in the country town on the 
outskirts of which he lives. He was one of those 
tall, spare men, black-haired and black-eyed, ca- 
pable of bearing great fatigue, full to the brim of 
vitality. He was a great reader, fond of music and 
art; married to a no less cultivated and active wife, 
but childless. There never was a man who had a 
keener enjoyment of existence in all its aspects. 
It used to be a marvel to me to see at how many 
points a man could touch life, and the almost child- 
like zest which he threw into everything which he 
did. 



84 The Thread of Gold 

On arriving at the house, a pleasant old-fash- 
ioned place with a big shady garden, I was shown 
into a large book-lined study, and there presently 
crept and tottered into the room, leaning on two 
sticks, a figure which I can only say in no respect 
recalled to me the recollection of my friend. He 
was bent and wasted, his hair was white; and there 
was that sunken look about the temples, that tra- 
cery of lines about the eyes that tells of constant 
suffering. But the voice was unaltered, full, reso- 
nant, and distinct as ever. He sat down and was 
silent for a moment. I think that the motion even 
from one room into another caused him great pain. 
Then he began to talk; first he told me of the acci- 
dent, and his journeys in search of health. " But 
the comfort is," he added, " that the doctors have 
now decided that they can do no more for me, and 
I need leave home no more." He told me that he 
still went to his business every day — and I found 
that it was prospering greatly — and that though he 
could not drive, he could get out in a wheeled chair ; 
he said nothing of his sufferings, and presently be- 
gan to talk of books and politics. Gradually I 
realised that I was in the company of a thoroughly 
cheerful man. It was not the cheerfulness that 
comes of effort, of a determined attempt to be in- 
terested in old pursuits, but the abundant and over- 
flowing cheerfulness of a man who has still a firm 



The Cripple 85 

grasp on life. He argued, he discussed with the 
same eager Hveliness ; and his laugh had the careless 
and good-humoured ring of a man whose mind was 
entirely content. 

His wife soon entered; and we sat for a long 
time talking. I was keenly moved by the relations 
between them; she displayed none of that minute 
attention to his needs, none of that watchful anxiety 
which I have often thought, tenderly lavished as 
it is upon invalids, must bring home to them a pain- 
ful sense of their dependence and helplessness ; and 
he too showed no trace of that fretful exigence 
which is too often the characteristic of those who 
cannot assist themselves, and which almost invari- 
ably arises in the case of eager and active tempera- 
ments thus afflicted, those whose minds range 
quickly from subject to subject, and who feel their 
disabilities at every turn. At one moment he 
wanted his glasses to read something from a book 
that lay beside him. He asked his wife with a 
gentle courtesy to find them. They were discov- 
ered in his own breast-pocket, into which he could 
not even put his feeble hand, and he apologised for 
his stupidity with an affectionate humility which 
made me feel inclined to tears, especially when I 
saw the pleasure Avhich the performance of this 
trifling service obviously caused her. It was just 
the same, I afterwards noticed, with a young 



86 The Thread of Gold 

attendant who waited on him at luncheon, an oc- 
casion which revealed to me the full extent of his 
helplessness. 

I gathered from his wife in the course of the af- 
ternoon that though his life was not threatened, 
yet that there was no doubt that his helplessness 
was increasing. He could still hold a book and 
turn the pages ; but it was improbable that he could 
do so for long, and he was amusing himself by in- 
venting a mechanical device for doing this. But 
she too talked of the prospect with a quiet tran- 
quillity. She said that he was making arrange- 
ments to direct his business from his house, as it 
was becoming difficult for him to enter the office. 

He himself showed the same unabated cheerful- 
ness during the whole of my visit, and spoke of the 
enjoyment it had brought him. There was not the 
slightest touch of self-pity about his talk. 

I should have admired and wondered at the forti- 
tude of this gallant pair, if I had seen signs of re- 
pression and self -conquest about them; if they had 
relapsed even momentarily into repining, if they 
had shown signs of a faithful determination to 
make the best of a bad business. But I could dis- 
cern no trace of such a mood about either of them. 
Whether this kindly and sweet patience has been 
acquired, after hard and miserable wrestlings with 
despair and wretchedness, I cannot say, but I am in- 



The Cripple 87 

clined to think that it is not so. It seems to me 
rather to be the display of perfect manliness and 
womanliness in the presence of an irreparable 
calamity, a wonderful and amazing compensation, 
sent quietly from the deepest fortress of Love to 
these simple and generous natures, who live in each 
other's lives. I tried to picture to myself what my 
own thoughts would be if condemned to this sad 
condition ; I could only foresee a fretful irritability, 
a wild anguish, alternating with a torpid stupefac- 
tion. " I seem to love the old books better than 
ever," my friend had said, smiling softly, in the 
course of the afternoon; " I used to read them hur- 
riedly and generally in the old days but now I 
have time to think over them — to reflect — I never 
knew what a pleasure reflection was." I could not 
help feeling as he said the words that with me such a 
stroke as he has suffered would have dashed the life, 
the colour, out of books, and left them faded and 
withered husks. Half the charm of books, I have 
always thought, is the interplay of the commentary 
of life and experience. I ventured to ask him if 
this was not the case. " No," he said, " I don't 
think it is — I seem more interested in people, in 
events, in thoughts than ever; and one gets them 
from a purer spring — I don't know if I can ex- 
plain," he added, " but I think that one sees it all 
from a different perspective, in a truer light, when 



88 The Thread of Gold 

one's OMn desires and possibilities are so much more 
limited." When I said good-bye to him, he smiled 
at me and hoped that I should repeat my visit. 
*' Don't think of me as unhappy," he added, and 
his wife, who was standing by him, said, " Indeed 
you need not; " and the two smiled at each other in 
a way which made me feel that they were speaking 
the simple truth, and that they had found an inter- 
pretation of life, a serene region to abide in, which 
I, with all my activities, hopes, fears, businesses, 
had somehow missed. The pity of it! and yet the 
beauty of it ! As I went away I felt that I had in- 
deed trodden on holy ground, and seen the trans- 
figuration of humanity and pain into something 
august, tranquil, and divine. 

XVII 

There are certain things in the world that are 
so praiseworthy that it seems a needless, indeed an 
almost laughable thing to praise them; such things 
are love and friendship, food and sleep, spring and 
summer; such things, too, are the wisest books, the 
greatest pictures, the noblest cities. But for all 
that I mean to try and make a little hymn in prose 
in honour of Oxford, a city I have seen but seldom, 
and which yet appears to me one of the most beau- 
tiful things in the world. 



Oxford 89 

I do not wish to single out particular buildings, 
but to praise the whole effect of the place, such as 
it seemed to me on a day of bright sun and cool 
air, when I wandered hour after hour among the 
streets, bewildered and almost intoxicated with 
beauty, feeling as a poor man might who has 
pinched all his life, and made the most of single 
coins, and who is brought into the presence of a 
heap of piled-up gold, and told that it is all his own. 

I have seen it said in foolish books that it is a mis- 
fortune to Oxford that so many of the buildings 
have been built out of so perishable a vein of stone. 
It is indeed a misfortune in one respect, that it 
tempts men of dull and precise minds to restore and 
replace buildings of incomparable grace, because 
their outline is so exquisitely blurred by time and 
decay. I remember myself, as a child, visiting 
Oxford, and thinking that some of the buildings 
were almost shamefully ruinous of aspect ; now that 
I am wiser I know that we have in these battered 
and fretted palace-fronts a kind of beauty that fills 
the rnind with an almost despairing sense of loveli- 
ness, till the heart aches with gratitude, and thrills 
with the desire to proclaim the glory of the sight 
aloud. 

These black-fronted blistered facades, so threat- 
ening, so sombre, yet screening so bright and clear 
a current of life; with the tender green of budding 



90 The Thread of Gold 

spring trees, chestnuts full of silvery spires, glossy- 
leaved creepers clinging, with tin}^ hands, to cornice 
and parapet, give surely the sharpest and most deli- 
cate sense that it is possible to conceive of the con- 
trast on which the essence of so much beauty de- 
pends. To pass through one of these dark and 
smoke-stained courts, with every line mellowed and 
harmonised, as if it had grown up so out of the 
earth; to find one's self in a sunny pleasaunce, car- 
peted ^\ith velvet turf, and set thick with flowers, 
makes the spirit sigh with delight. Nowhere in the 
world can one see such a thing as those great gate- 
piers, with a cognisance a-top, with a grille of iron- 
work between them, all sweetly entwined with some 
slim vagrant creeper, that gives a glimpse and a hint 
— no more — of a fairy-land of shelter and fountains 
within. I have seen such palaces stand in quiet and 
stately parks, as old, as majestic, as finely pro- 
portioned as the buildings of Oxford; but the very 
blackness of the city air, and the drifting smoke of 
the town, gives that added touch of grimness and 
mystery that the country airs cannot communicate. 
And even fairer sights are contained within; those 
panelled, dark-roofed halls, with their array of por- 
traits gravely and intently regarding the stranger; 
the chaj^els, with their splendid classical screens and 
stalls, rich and dim with ancient glass. The towers, 
domes, and steeples ; and all set not in a mere para- 



Oxford 91 

dise of lawns and glades, but in the very heart of a 
city, itself full of quaint and ancient houses, but 
busy with all the activity of a brisk and prosperous 
town ; thereby again giving the strong and satisfy- 
ing sense of contrast, the sense of eager and every- 
day cares and pleasures, side by side with these 
secluded havens of peace, the courts and cloisters, 
where men may yet live a life of gentle thought and 
quiet contemplation, untroubled, nay, even stimu- 
lated, by the presence of a bustling life so near at 
hand, which yet may not intrude upon the older 
dream. 

I do not know whether my taste is entirely trust- 
worthy, but I confess that I find the Italianate and 
classical buildings of Oxford finer than the Gothic 
buildings. The Gothic buildings are quainter, per- 
haps, more picturesque, but there is an air of solemn 
pomp and sober dignity about the classical build- 
ings that harmonises better with the sense of wealth 
and grave security that is so characteristic of the 
place. The Gothic buildings seem a survival, and 
have thus a more romantic interest, a more poetical 
kind of association. But the classical porticoes 
and facades seem to possess a nobler dignity, and to 
provide a more appropriate setting for modern 
Oxford; because the spirit of Oxford is more the 
spirit of the Renaissance than the spirit of the 
Schoolmen; and personally I prefer that ecclesias- 



92 The Thread of Gold 

ticism should be more of a flavour than a temper; I 
mean that though I rejoice to think that sober 
ecclesiastical influences contribute a serious grace 
to the life of Oxford, yet I am glad to feel that the 
spirit of the place is liberal rather than ecclesiasti- 
cal. Such traces as one sees in the chapels of the 
Oxford Movement, in the shape of paltry stained 
glass, starved reredoses, modern Gothic woodwork, 
would be purely dei^lorable from the artistic point 
of view, if they did not possess a historical interest. 
They speak of interrupted development, an at- 
tempt to put back the shadow on the dial, to re- 
turn to a narrower and more rigid tone, to put old 
wine into new bottles, which betrays a want of con- 
fidence in the expansive power of God. I hate 
with a deep-seated hatred all such attempts to bind 
and confine the rising tide of thought. I want to 
see religion vital and not formal, elastic and not 
cramped by precedent and tradition. And thus 
I love to see worship enshrined in noble classical 
buildings, which seem to me to speak of a desire to 
infuse the intellectual spirit of Greece, the digni- 
fied imperialism of Rome into the more timid and 
secluded ecclesiastical life, making it fuller, larger, 
more free, more deliberate. 

But even apart from the buildings, which are 
after all but the body of the place, tlie soul of Ox- 
ford, its inner spirit, is what lends it its "satisfying 



Oxford 93 

charm. On the one hand, it gives the sense of the 
dignity of the intellect ; one reflects that here can be 
lived lives of stately simplicity, of high enthusiasm, 
apart from personal wealth, and yet surrounded by 
enough of seemly dignity to give life the charm of 
grave order and quiet solemnity. Here are oppor- 
tunity for peaceful and congenial work, to the sound 
of melodious bells, uninterrupted hours, as much 
society of a simple kind as a man can desire, and the 
whole with a background of exquisite buildings and 
rich gardens. And then, too, there is the tide of 
youthful life that floods every corner of the place. 
It is an endless pleasure to see the troops of slim 
and alert young figures, full of enjoyment and life, 
with all the best gifts of life, health, work, amuse- 
ment, society, friendship, lying ready to their hand. 
The sense of this beating and thrilling pulse of life 
circulating through these sombre and splendid 
buildings is what gives the place its inner glow ; this 
life full of hope, of sensation, of emotion, not yet 
shadowed, or disillusioned, or weary, seems to be as 
the fire on the altar, throwing up its sharp-darting 
tongues of flame, its clouds of fragrant smoke, 
giving warmth and significance and a fiery heart to 
a sombre shrine. 

And so it is that Oxford is in a sort a magnetic 
pole for England; a pole not, perhaps, of intellect- 
ual energy, or strenuous liberalism, or clamorous 



94 The Thread of Gold 

aims, or political ideas ; few, perhaps, of the sturdy 
forces that make England great, centre there. The 
greatness of England is, I suppose, made up by 
her breez5% loud-voiced sailors, her lively, plucky 
soldiers, her ardent, undefeated merchants, her 
tranquil administrators; by the stubborn adven- 
turous spirit that makes itself at home everywhere, 
and finds it natural to assume responsibilities. 
But to Oxford set the currents of what may be 
called intellectual emotion, the ideals that may not 
make for immediate national greatness, but which, 
if delicately and faithfully nurtured, hold out at 
least a hope of affecting the intellectual and spirit- 
ual life of the world. There is something about 
Oxford which is not in the least typical of Eng- 
land, but typical of the larger brotherhood that is 
independent of nationalities; that is akin to the 
spirit which in any land and in every age has pro- 
duced imperishable monuments of the ardent human 
soul. The tribe of Oxford is the tribe from whose 
heart sprang the Psalms of David; Homer and 
Sophocles, Plato and Virgil, Dante and Goethe are 
all of the same divine company. It may be said 
that John Bull, the sturdy angel of England, 
turns his back slightingly upon such influences; 
that he regards Oxford as an incidental ornament 
of his person, like a seal that jingles at his fob. 
But all generous and delicate spirits do her a secret 



Authorship 95 

homage, as a place where the seeds of beauty and 
emotion, of wisdom and understanding, are sown, 
as in a secret garden. Hearts such as these, even 
whirhng past that celestial city, among her poor 
suburbs, feel an inexpressible thrill at the sight of 
her towers and domes, her walls and groves. 
Quam dilecta sunt tahernacula, they will say; and 
they will breathe a reverent prayer that there may 
be no leading into captivity and no complaining in 
her streets. 

XVIII 

I FOUND myself at dinner the other day next to 
an old friend, whom I see but seldom; a quiet, 
laborious, able man, with the charm of perfect 
modesty and candour, who, moreover, writes a very 
beautiful and lucid stj'^le. I said to him that I con- 
ceived it to be my mission, whenever I met him, to 
enquire what he was writing, and to beg him to 
write more. He said smilingly that he was very 
much occupied in his work, which is teaching, and 
found little time to write; "besides," he said, "I 
think that one writes too much." He went on to 
say that though he loved writing well enough when 
he was in the mood for it, yet that the labour of 
shaping sentences, and lifting them to their places, 
was very severe. 



96 The Thre^id of Gold 

I felt myself a little rebuked by this, for I will 
here confess that writing is the one pleasure and 
preoccupation of my own life, though I do not 
publish a half of what I write. It set me wonder- 
ing whether I did indeed write too much; and so I 
said to him: " You mean, I suppose, that one gets 
into the habit of serving up the same ideas over and 
over again, with a different sauce, perhaps ; but still 
the same ideas?" "Yes," he said, "that is what 
I mean. When I have written anything that I 
care about, I feel that I must wait a long time be- 
fore the cistern fills again." 

We went on to talk of other things; but I have 
since been reflecting whether there is truth in what 
my friend said. If this view is true of writing, 
then it is surely the only art that is so hampered. 
We should never think that an artist worked too 
much; we might feel that he did not perhaps finish 
his big pictures sufficiently; but if he did not spare 
labour in finishing his pictures, we should never 
find fault with him for doing, say, as Turner did, 
and making endless studies and sketches, day after 
day, of all that struck him as being beautiful. We 
should feel indeed that some of these unconsidered 
and rapid sketches had a charm and a grace that 
the more elaborate pictures might miss ; and in any 
case we should feel that the more that he worked, 
the firmer and easier would become his sweep of 



Authorship 97, 

hand, the more deft his power of indicating a large 
effect by an economy of resource. The musician, 
too: no one would think of finding fault with him 
for working every day at his art; and it is the same 
with all craftsmen ; the more they worked, the surer 
would their touch be. 

Now I am inclined to believe that what makes 
wi-iting good is not so much the pains taken with 
a particular piece of work, the retouching, the cor- 
rections, the dear delays. Still more fruitful than 
this labour is the labour spent on work that is never 
used, that never sees the light. Writing is to me 
the simplest and best pleasure in the world; the 
mere shaping of an idea in words is the occupation 
of all others I most love; indeed, to speak frankly, 
I plan and arrange all my days that I may secure 
a space for writing, not from a sense of duty, but 
merely from a sense of delight. The whole world 
teems with subjects and thoughts, sights of beauty 
and images of joy and sorrow, that I desire to put 
into words ; and to forbid myself to write would be 
to exercise the strongest self-denial of which I am 
capable. Of course I do not mean that I can al- 
ways please myself: I have piles of manuscripts 
laid aside which fail either in conception or expres- 
sion, or in both. But there are a dozen books I 
would like to write if I had the time. 

To be honest, I do not believe in fretting too 
7 



98 The Thread of Gold 

much over a piece of wTiting. Writing, labori- 
ously constructed, painfully ornamented, is often, 
I think, both laborious and painful to read; there 
is a sense of strain about it. It is like those uneasy 
figures that one sees in the carved gargoyles of old 
churches, crushed and writhing for ever under a 
sense of weight painfully sustained, or holding a 
gaping mouth open, for the water-pipe to discharge 
its contents therethrough. However ingenious 
these carvings are, they always give a sense of ten- 
sion and oppression to the mind ; and it is the same 
with laboured writers; my theory of writing rather 
is that the conception should be as clear as possible, 
and then that the words should flow like a trans- 
parent stream, following as simply as possible the 
shape and outline of the thought within, like a 
waterbreak over a boulder in a stream's bed. This, 
I think, is best attained by infinite practice. If a 
piece of work seems to be heavy and muddy, let it 
be thrown aside ungrudgingly; but the attempt, 
even though it be a failure, makes the next attempt 
easier. 

I do not think that one can wTite for very long 
at a time to much purpose; I take the two or three 
hours when the mind is clearest and freshest, and 
write as rapidly as I can; this secures, it seems to 
me, a clearness and a unity which cannot be at- 
tained by fretful labour, by poking and pinching at 



Authorship 99 

one's work. One avoids by rapidity and ardour 
the dangerous defect of repetition ; a big task must 
be divided into small sharp episodes to be thus 
swiftly treated. The thought of such a writer as 
Flaubert lying on his couch or pacing his room, the 
racked and tortured medium of his art, spending 
hours in selecting the one perfect word for his pur- 
pose, is a noble and inspiring picture; but such a 
process does not, I fear, always end in producing 
the effect at which it aims; it improves the texture 
at a minute point; it sacrifices width and freedom. 
Together with clearness of conception and re- 
source of vocabulary must come a certain eagerness 
of mood. When all three qualities are present, the 
result is good work, however rapidly it may be pro- 
duced. If one of the three is lacking, the work 
sticks, hangs, and grates ; and thus what I feel that 
the word-artist ought to do is to aim at working 
on these lines, but to be very strict and severe about 
the ultimate selection of his work. If, for instance, 
in a big task, a section has been dully and im- 
potently written, let him put the manuscript aside, 
and think no more of it for a while; let him not 
spend labour in attempting to mend bad work; 
then, on some later occasion, let him again get his 
conception clear, and write the whole section again ; 
if he loves writing for itself he will not care how 
often this process is repeated. 

LOFC. 



100 The Thread of Gold 

I am speaking here very frankly ; and I will own 
that for myself, when the day has rolled past and 
when the sacred hour comes, I sit down to wi'ite 
with an appetite, a keen rapture, such as a hungry 
man may feel when he sits down to a savoury meal. 
There is a real physical emotion that accompanies 
the process ; and it is a deep and lively distress that 
I feel when I am living under conditions that do not 
allow me to exercise my craft, at being compelled 
to waste the appropriate hours in other occupations. 

It may be fairly urged that with this intense 
impulse to write, I ought to have contrived to make 
myself into a better writer ; and it might be thought 
that there is something either grotesque or pathetic 
in so much emotional enjoyment issuing in so slen- 
der a performance. But the essence of the happi- 
ness is that the joy resides in the doing of the work 
and not in the giving it to the world ; and though I 
do not pretend not to be fully alive to the delight 
of having my work praised and appreciated, that is 
altogether a secondary pleasure which in no way 
competes with the luxury of expression. 

I am not ungrateful for this delight; it may, 
I know, be withdrawn from me; but meanwhile 
the world seems to be full to the brim of expressive 
and significant things. There is a beautiful old 
story of a saint who saw in a vision a shining figure 
approaching him, holding in his hand a dark and 



Hamlet 101 

cloudy globe. He held it out, and the saint look- 
ing attentively upon it, saw that it appeared to rep- 
resent the earth in miniature; there were the 
continents and seas, with clouds sweeping over 
them; and, for all that it was so minute, he could 
see cities and plains, and little figures moving to 
and fro. The angel laid his finger on a part of the 
globe, and detached from it a small cluster of 
islands, drawing them out of the sea; and the saint 
saw that they were peopled by a folk, whom he 
knew, in some way that he could not wholly under- 
stand, to be dreary and uncomforted. He heard a 
voice saying, "He taketli up the isles as a very small 
thing;'" and it darted into his mind that his work 
lay with the people of those sad islands ; that he was 
to go thither, and speak to them a message of hope. 
It is a beautiful story; and it has always seemed 
to me that the work of the artist is like that. He 
is to detach from the great peopled globe what little 
portion seems to appeal to him most; and he must 
then say what he can to encourage and sustain men, 
whatever thoughts of joy and hope come most home 
to him in his long and eager pilgrimage. 

XIX 

We were talking yesterday about the stage, a 
subject in which I am ashamed to confess I take 



102 The Thread of Gold 

but a feeble interest, though I fully recognise the 
appeal of the drama to certain minds, and its pos- 
sibilities. One of the party, who had all his life 
been a great frequenter of theatres, turned to me 
and said: "After all, there is one play which seems 
to be always popular, and to affect all audiences, 
the poor, the middle-class, the cultivated, alike — 
Hamlet/' " Yes," I said, " and I wonder why that 
is? " " Well," he said, " it is this, I think: that be- 
neath all its subtleties, all its intellectual force, it 
has an emotional appeal to every one who has lived 
in the world; every one sees himself more or less in 
Hamlet; every one has been in a situation in which 
he felt that circumstances were too strong for him; 
and then, too," he added, " there is always a deep 
and romantic interest about the case of a man who 
has every possible external advantage, youth, 
health, wealth, rank, love, ardour, and zest, who is 
j^et utterly miserable, and moves to a dark end un- 
der a shadow of doom." 

I thought, and think, this a profound and deli- 
cate criticism. There is, of course, a great deal 
more in Hamlet; there is its high poetry, its mourn- 
ful dwelling upon deep mysteries, its supernatural 
terrors, its w^orldly wisdom, its penetrating insight ; 
but these are all accessories to the central thought; 
the conception is absolutely firm throughout. The 
hunted soul of Hamlet, after a pleasant and easy 



Hamlet 103 

drifting upon the stream of happy events, finds a 
sombre curtain suddenly twitched aside, and is 
confronted with a tragedy so dark, a choice so des- 
perate, that the reehng brain staggers, and can 
hardly keep its hold upon the events and habits of 
life. Day by day the shadow flits beside him; 
morning after morning he uncloses his sad eyes 
upon a world, which he had found so sweet, and 
which he now sees to be so terrible ; the insistent hor- 
ror breeds a whole troop of spectres, so that all the 
quiet experiences of life, friendship, love, nature, 
art, become big with uneasy speculations and sur- 
mises; from the rampart-platform by the sea until 
the peal of ordnance is shot off, as the poor bodies 
are carried out, every moment brings with it some 
shocking or brooding experience. Hamlet is not 
strong enough to close his eyes to these things; if 
for a moment he attempts this, some tragic thought 
plucks at his shoulder, and bids the awakened 
sleeper look out into the struggling light. Neither 
is he strong enough to face the situation with reso- 
lution and courage. He turns and doubles before 
the pursuing Fury; he hopes against hope that a 
door of escape may be opened. He poisons the air 
with gloom and suspicion ; he feeds with wilful sad- 
ness upon the most melancholy images of death and 
despair. And though the great creator of this 
mournful labyrinth, this atrocious dilemma, can 



104 The Thread of Gold 

involve the sad spirit with an art that thrills all the 
most delicate fibres of the human spirit, he cannot 
stammer out even the most faltering solution, the 
smallest word of comfort or hope. He leaves the 
problem, where he took it up, in the mighty hands 
of God. 

And thus the play stands as the supreme memo- 
rial of the tortured spirit. The sad soul of the 
prince seems like an orange-banded bee, buzzing 
against the glass of some closed chamber-window, 
w^ondering heavily what is the clear yet palpable 
medium that keeps it, in spite of all its efforts, from 
re-entering the sunny paradise of tree and flower, 
that lies so close at hand, and that is yet unattain- 
able; until one wonders wh}^ the supreme Lord of 
the place cannot put forth a finger, and release the 
ineffectual spirit from its fruitless pain. As the 
play gathers and thickens to its crisis, one experi- 
ences — and this is surely a test of the highest art — 
the poignant desire to explain, to reason, to com- 
fort, to relieve; even if one cannot help, one longs 
at least to utter the yearning of the heart, the in- 
tense sympathy that one feels for the multitude of 
sorrows that oppress this laden spirit ; to assuage if 
only for a moment, by an answering glance of love, 
the fire that burns in those stricken eyes. And one 
must bear away from the story not only the intel- 
lectual satisfaction, the emotional excitement, but 



A Sealed Spirit 105 

a deep desire to help, as far as a man can, the woes 
of spirits who, all the world over, are in the grip of 
these dreary agonies. 

And that, after all, is the secret of the art that 
deals with the presentment of sorrow; with the art 
that deals with pure beauty the end is plain enough ; 
we may stay our hearts upon it, plunge with grati- 
tude into the pure stream, and recognise it for a 
sweet and wholesome gift of God; but the art that 
makes sorrow beautiful, what are we to do with 
that ? We may learn to bear, we may learn to hope 
that there is, in the mind of God, if we could but 
read it, a region where both beauty and sadness are 
one ; and meanwhile it may teach us to let our heart 
go out, in love and pity, to all who are bound upon 
their pilgrimage in heaviness, and passing uncom- 
f orted through the dark valley. 

XX 

A FEW weeks ago I was staying with a friend of 
mine, a clergj^^man in the country. He told me one 
evening a very sad story about one of his parishion- 
ers. This was a man who had been a clerk in a 
London Bank, whose eyesight had failed, and who 
had at last become totally blind. He was, at the 
time when this calamity fell upon him, about forty 



106 The Thread of Gold 

years of age. The Directors of the Bank gave him 
a small pension, and he had a very small income of 
his own; he was married, with one son, who was 
shortly after taken into the Bank as a clerk. The 
man and his wife came into the parish, and took a 
tiny cottage, where they lived very simply and 
frugally. But within a year or two his hearing had 
also failed, and he had since become totally deaf. 
It is almost appalling to reflect upon the condition 
of helplessness to which this double calamity can 
reduce a man. To be cut off from the sights and 
sounds of the world, with these two avenues of per- 
ception closed, so as to be able to take cognisance of 
external things only through scent and touch! It 
would seem to be well-nigh unendurable! He had 
learned to read raised type with his fingers, and had 
been presented by some friends ^Wth two or three 
books of this kind. His speech was, as is always 
the case, affected, but still intelligible. Only the 
simplest facts could be communicated to him, by 
means of a set of cards, with w^ords in raised type, 
out of which a few sentences could be arranged. 
But he and his wife had invented a code of touch, 
b}^ means of which she was able to a certain extent, 
though of course very inadequately, to communi- 
cate with him. I asked how he employed himself, 
and I was told that he wrote a good deal, — curious, 
rhapsodical compositions, dwelling much on his own 



A Sealed Spirit 107 

thoughts and fancies. " He sits," said the Vicar, 
" for hours together on a bench in his garden, and 
walks about, guided by his wife. His sense of both 
smell and touch have become extraordinarily acute ; 
and, afflicted as he is, I am sure he is not at all an 
unhappy man." He produced some of the writ- 
ings of which he had spoken. They were written 
in a big, clear hand. I read them with intense in- 
terest. Some of them were recollections of his 
childish days, set in a somewhat antique and biblical 
phraseology. Some of them were curious reveries, 
dwelling much upon the perception of natural 
things through scent. He complained, I remem- 
ber, that life was so much less interesting in winter 
because scents were so much less sweet and less 
complex than in summer. But the whole of the 
writings showed a serene exaltation of mind. There 
was not a touch of repining or resignation about 
them. He spoke much of the aesthetic pleasure 
that he received from an increased power of disen- 
tangling the component elements of a scent, such 
as came from his garden on a warm summer day. 
Some of the writings that were shown me were re- 
ligious in character, in which the man spoke of a 
constant sense of the nearness of God's presence, 
and of a strange joy that filled his heart. 

On the following day the Vicar suggested that 
we should go to see him; we turned out of a lane, 



108 The Thread of Gold 

and found a little cottage with a thatched roof, 
standing in a small orchard, bright with flowers. 
On a bench we saw the man sitting, entirely uncon- 
scious of our presence. He was a tall, strongly- 
built fellow with a beard, bronzed and healthy in 
appearance. His eyes were wide open, and, but 
for a curious fixity of gaze, I should not have sus- 
pected that he was blind. His hands were folded 
on his knee, and he was smiling ; once or twice I saw 
his lips move as if he was talking to himself. " We 
won't go up to him," said the Vicar, " as it might 
startle him; we will find his wife." So we went up 
to the cottage door, and knocked. It was opened to 
us by a small elderly woman, with a grave, simple 
look, and a very pleasant smile. The little place 
was wonderfully clean and neat. The Vicar in- 
troduced me, saying that I had been much inter- 
ested in her husband's writings, and had come to 
call on him. She smiled briskly, and said that he 
would be much pleased. We walked down the 
path; when we were within a few feet of him, he 
became aware of our presence, and turned his head 
with a quiet, expectant air. His wife went up to 
him, took his hand, and seemed to beat on it softly 
with her fingers ; he smiled, and presently raised his 
hat, as if to greet us, and then took up a little writ- 
ing-pad which lay beside him, and began to write. 
A httle conversation followed, his wife reading out 



A Sealed Spirit 109 

what he had written, and then interpreting our re- 
marks to him. What struck me most was the ab- 
sence of egotism in what he wrote. He asked the 
Vicar one or two questions, and desired to know 
who I was. I went and sat down beside him; he 
wrote in his book that it was a pleasure to him to 
meet a stranger. Might he take the liberty of see- 
ing him in his own way? " He means," said the 
wife, smiHng, " might he put his hand on your face 
—some people do not like it," she added apolo- 
getically, " and he will quite understand if you do 
not." I said that I was dehghted; and the blind 
man thereupon laid his hand upon my sleeve, and 
with an incredible deftness and lightness of touch, 
so that I hardly felt it, passed his finger-tips over 
my coat and waistcoat, lingered for a moment over 
my watch-chain, then over my tie and collar, and 
then very gently over my face and hair; it did not 
last half a minute, and there was something curi- 
ously magnetic in the touch of the slim firm fingers. 
" Now I see him," he wrote; " please thank him." 
" It will please him," said the Vicar, " if we ask him 
to describe you." In a moment, after a few touches 
of his wife's hand, he smiled, and wrote down a 
really remarkably accurate picture of my appear- 
ance. We then asked him a few questions about 
himself. " Very well and very happy," he wrote, 
" full of the love of God " ; and then added, " You 



110 The Theead of Gold 

will perhaps think that I get tired of doing no- 
thing, but the time is too short for all I want to do." 
" It is quite true," said his wife, smiling as she read 
it. " He is as pleased as a child with everything, 
and every one is so good to him." Presently she 
asked him to read aloud to us; and in a voice of 
great distinctness, he read a few verses of the Book 
of Job from a big volume. The voice was high and 
resonant, but varied strangely in pitch. He asked 
at the end whether we had heard every word, and 
being told that we had, smiled very sweetly and 
frankly, like a boy who has performed a task well. 
The Vicar suggested that he should come for a turn 
with us, at which he visibly brightened, and said he 
would like to walk through the village. He took 
our arms, walking between us; and with a delicate 
courtesy, knowing that we could not communicate 
with him, talked himself, very quietly and simply, 
almost all the way, partly of what he was con- 
vinced we were passing, — guessing, I imagine, 
mainly by a sense of smell, and interpreting it all 
with astonishing accuracy, though I confess I was 
often unable even to detect the scents which guided 
him. We walked thus for half an hour, listening 
to his quiet talk. Two or three people came up to 
us. Each time the Vicar checked him, and he held 
out his hand to be shaken; in each case he recog- 
nised the person by the mere touch of the hand. 



A Sealed Spirit 111 

" Mrs. Purvis, is n't it ? Well, you see me in very 
good company this morning, don't you? It is so 
kind of the Vicar and his friend to take me out, and 
it is pleasant to meet friends in the village." He 
seemed to know all about the affairs of the place, 
and made enquiries after various people. 

It was a very strange experience to walk thus 
with a fellow-creature suffering from these sad 
limitations, and yet to be conscious of being in the 
presence of so perfectly contented and cheerful a 
spirit. Before we parted, he wrote on his pad that 
he was working hard. " I am trying to write a lit- 
tle book; of course I know that I can never see it, 
but I should like to tell people that it is possible to 
live a life like mine, and to be full of happiness; 
that God sends me abundance of joy, so that I can 
say with truth that I am happier now than ever I 
was in the old days. Such peace and joy, with so 
many to love me ; so little that I can do for others, 
except to speak of the marvellous goodness of God, 
and of the beautiful thoughts he gives me." " Yes, 
he has WTitten some chapters," said the faithful 
wife; "but he does not want any one to see them 
till they are done." 

I shall never forget the sight of the two as we 
went away: he stood, smiling and waving his hand, 
under an apple-tree in full bloom, with the sun shin- 
ing on the flowers. It gave me the sense of a pure 



112 The Thread of Gold 

and simple content such as I have rarely experi- 
enced. The beauty and strength of the picture 
have dwelt with me ever since, showing me that a 
soul can be thus shut up in what would seem to be 
so dark a prison, with the windows, through which 
most of us look upon the world, closed and shut- 
tered; and yet not only not losing the joy of hfe, 
but seeming to taste it in fullest measure. If one 
could but accept thus one's own limitations, view- 
ing them not as sources of pleasure closed, but as 
opening the door more wide to what remains; the 
very simplicity and rarity of the perceptions that 
are left, gaining in depth and quality from their 
isolation. But beyond all this lies that well-spring 
of inner joy, which seems to be withheld from so 
many of us. Is it indeed withheld? Is it conferred 
upon this poor soul simply as a tender compensa- 
tion? Can we not bj'- quiet passivity, rather than 
by resolute effort, learn the secret of it. I believe 
myself that the source is there in many hearts, but 
that we visit it too rarely, and forget it in the multi- 
tude of little cares and businesses, which seem so 
important, so absorbing. It is like a hidden treas- 
ure, which we go so far abroad to seek, and for 
which we endure much weariness of wandering; 
while all the while it is buried in our own garden- 
ground; we have paced to and fro above it many 
times, never dreaming that the bright thing lay be- 



Leisure 113 

neath our feet, and within reach of our forgetful 
hand. 



XXI 

It was a bright day in early spring; large fleecy 
clouds floated in a blue sky; the wind was cool, but 
the sun lay hot in sheltered places. 

I was spending a few days with an old friend, at 
a little house he calls his Hermitage, in a Western 
valley; we had walked out, had passed the bridge, 
and had stood awhile to see the clear stream flowing, 
a vein of reflected sapphire, among the green wa- 
ter-meadows ; we had climbed up among the beech- 
woods, through copses full of primroses, to a large 
heathery hill, where a clump of old pines stood in- 
side an ancient earth-work. The forest lay at our 
feet, and the doves cooed lazily among the tree-tops ; 
beyond lay the plain, with a long range of smooth 
downs behind, where the river broadened to the sea- 
pool, which narrowed again to the little harbour; 
and, across the clustered house-roofs and the lonely 
church tower of the port, we could see a glint of the 
sea. 

We sat awhile in silence; then " Come," I said, 
" I am going to be impertinent ! I am in a mood 
to ask questions, and to have full answers." 

8 



114 The Thread of Gold 

"And I," said my host placidly, " am always in 
the mood to answer questions." 

I would call my friend a poet, because he is 
sealed of the tribe, if ever man was; j^et he has 
never written verses to my knowledge. He is a 
big, burly, quiet man, gentle and meditative of as- 
pect; shy before company, voluble in private. 
Half-humorous, half melancholy. He has been a 
man of affairs, prosperous, too, and shrewd. But 
nothing in his life was ever so poetical as the way 
in which, to the surprise and even consternation of 
all his friends, he announced one day, when he was 
turned of forty, that he had had enough of work, 
and that he would do no more. Well, he had no 
one to say him nay; he has but few relations, none 
in any way dependent on him ; he has a modest com- 
petence; and, being fond of all leisure^ things — 
books, music, the open air, the country, flowers, and 
the like — he has no need to fear that his time will be 
unoccupied. 

He looked lazily at me, biting a straw. " Come," 
said I again, " here is the time for a catechism. I 
have reason to think you are over forty ? " 

"Yes," said he, "the more 's the pity!" 

"And you have given up regular work," I said, 
" for over a year; and how do you like that? " 

" Like it? " he said. " Well, so much that I can 
never work again; and what is stranger still is that 



Leisure 115 

I never knew what it was to be really busy till I 
gave up work. Before, I was often bored; now, 
the day is never long enough for all I have to do." 

" But that is a dreadful confession," I said; " and 
how do you justify yourself for this miserable in- 
difference to all that is held to be of importance? " 

"Listen!" he said, smiling and holding up his 
hand. There floated up out of the wood the soft 
crooning of a dove, like the over-brimming of a 
tide of content. " There 's the answer," he added. 
"How does that dove justify his existence? and 
yet he has not much on his mind." 

" I have no answer ready," I said, " though there 
is one, I am sure, if you will only give me time; 
but let that come later: more questions first, and 
then I will deliver judgment. Now, attend to this 
seriously," I said. " How do you justify it that 
you are alone in the world, not mated, not a good 
husband and father ? The dove has not got that on 
his conscience." 

"Ah! " said my friend. " I have often asked my- 
self that. But for many j^ears I had not the time 
to fall in love; if I had been an idle man it would 
have been different, and now that I am free — well, 
I regard it as, on the whole, a wise dispensation. 
I have no domestic virtues ; I am a pretty common- 
place person, and I think there is no reason why I 
should perpetuate my own feeble qualities, bind 



116 The Thrilu) of Gold 

my dull qualities up closer with the life of the world. 
Besides, I have a theory that the world is made now 
very much as it was in the JNliddle Ages. There 
was but one choice then — a soldier or a monk. 
Now, I have no combative blood in me; I hate a 
row; I am a monk to the marrow of my bones, and 
the monks are the failures from the point of view 
of race. No monk should breed monks; there are 
enough of his kind in the hive already." 

" You a monk? " said I, laughing. " Why, you 
are nothing of the kind; you are just the sort of man 
for an adoring wife and a handful of big children. 
I must have a better answer." 

" Well, then," said he, rather seriously, " I will 
give you a better answer. There are some people 
whose affections are made to run, strong and 
straight, in a narrow channel. The world holds 
but one woman for a man of that type, and it is his 
business to find her ; but there are others, and I am 
one, who dribble away their love in a hundred chan- 
nels — in art, in nature, among friends. To speak 
frankly, I have had a hundred such passions. I 
made friends as a boy, quickly and romantically, 
with all kinds of people — some old, some young. 
Then I have loved books, and music, and, above all, 
the earth and the things of the earth. To the 
wholesome, normal man these things are but an 
agreeable background, and the real business of life 



Leisure 117 

lies with wife and child and work. But to me the 
real things have been the beautiful things — sunrise 
and sunset, streams and woods, old houses, talk, 
poetry, pictures, ideas. And I always liked my 
work, too." 

"And you did it well? " I said. 

" Oh, yes, well enough," he replied. " I have 
a clear head, and I am conscientious ; and then there 
was some fun to be got out of it at times. But 
it was never a part of myself for all that. And the 
reason why I gave it up was not because I was tired 
of it, but because I was getting to depend too much 
upon it. I should very soon have been unable to 
do without it." 

" But what is your programme? " I said, rather 
urgently. " Don't you want to be of some use 
in the world? To make other people better and 
happier, for instance." 

" My dear boy," said my companion, with a 
smile, " do you know that you are talking in a very 
conventional way? Of course, I desire that people 
should be better and happier, myself among the 
number; but how am I to set about it? Most peo- 
ple's idea of being better and happier is to make 
other people subscribe to make them richer. They 
want more things to eat and drink and wear; they 
want success and respectability, to be sidesmen and 
town councillors, and even Members of Parliament. 



118 The Thread of Gold 

Nothing is more hopelessly unimaginative than or- 
dinary people's aims and ideas, and the aims and 
ideas, too, that are propounded from pulpits. I 
don't want people to be richer and more prosper- 
ous ; I want them to be poorer and simpler. Which 
is the better man, the shepherd there on the down, 
out all day in the air, seeing a thousand pretty 
things, or the grocer behind his counter, living in 
an odour of lard and cheese, bowing and fussing, 
and drinking spirits in the evening? Of course, a 
wholesome-minded man may be wholesome-minded 
everywhere and anywhere; but prosperity, which is 
the Englisliman's idea of righteousness, is a very 
dangerous thing, and has very little of what is di- 
vine about it. If I had stuck to my work, as all my 
friends advised me, what would have been the re- 
sult? I should have had more money than I want, 
and nothing in the world to live for but my work. 
Of course, I know that I run the risk of being 
thought indolent and unpractical. If I were a 
prophet, I should find it easy enough to scold 
everybody, and find fault with the poor, peaceful 
world. But as I am not, I can onl}?- follow my own 
line of life, and try to see and love as many as I can 
of the beautiful things that God flings down all 
round us. I am not a philanthropist, I suppose; 
but most of the philanthropises I have known 
have seemed to me tiresome, self-seeking people, 



Leisure 119 

with a taste for trying to take everything out of 
God's hands. I am an individualist, I imagine. I 
think that most of us have to find our way, and to 
find it alone. I do try to help a few quiet people at 
the right moment; but I believe that every one has 
his own circle — some larger, some smaller — and that 
one does little good outside it. If every one would 
be content with that, the world would be mended in 
a trice." 

" I am glad that you, at least, admit that there 
is something to be mended," I said. 

" Oh, yes," said he, " the general conditions seem 
to me to want mending; but that, I humbly think, 
is God's matter, and not mine. The world is 
slowly broadening and improving, I believe. In 
these days, when we shoot our enemies and then 
nurse them, we are coming, I believe, to see even 
the gigantic absurdity of war ; but all that side of it 
is too big for me. I am no philosopher! What I 
believe we ought to do is to be patient, kind, and 
courageous in a corner. Now, I will give you an 
instance. I had a friend who was a good, hard- 
working clergyman; a brave, genial, courageous 
creature ; he had a town parish not far from here ; he 
liked his work, and he did it well. He was the 
friend of all the boys and girls in the parish; he 
worked a hundred useful, humble institutions. He 
was nothing of a preacher, and a poor speaker ; but 



120 The Thread of Gold 

something generous, honest, happy seemed to radi- 
ate from the man. Of course, they could not let 
him alone. They offered him a Bishopric. All 
his friends said he was bound to take it; the poor 
fellow wrote to me, and said that he dared not re- 
fuse a sphere of wider influence, and all that. I 
wrote and told him my mind — namely, that he was 
doing a splendid piece of quiet, sober work, and 
that he had better stick to it. But, of course, he 
did n't. Well, what is the result ? He is worried 
to death. He has a big house and a big household ; 
he is a welcome guest in country-houses and vicar- 
ages; he opens churches, he confirms; he makes 
endless poor speeches, and preaches weak sermons. 
His time is all frittered away in directing the ela- 
borate machinery of a diocese; and all his personal 
work is gone. I don't say he does n't impress peo- 
ple. But his strength lay in his personal work, his 
work as a neighbour and a friend. He is not a 
clever man ; he never says a suggestive thing — he is 
not a sower of thoughts, but a simple pastor. Well, 
I regard it as a huge and lamentable mistake that 
he should ever have changed his course; and the 
motive that made him do it was a bad one, only dis- 
guised as an angel of light. Instead of being the 
stoker of the train, he is now a distinguished pas- 
senger in a first-class carriage." 

" Well," I said, " I admit that there is a good 



Leisure 121 

deal in what you say. But if such a summons 
comes to a man, is it not more simple-minded to fol- 
low it dutifully? Is it not, after all, part of the 
guiding of God? " 

"Ah!" said my host, "that is a hard question, 
I admit. But a man must look deep into his heart, 
and face a situation of the kind bravely and simply. 
He must be quite sure that it is a summons from 
God, and not a temptation from the world. I ad- 
mit that it may be the former. But in the case of 
which I have just spoken, my friend ought to have 
seen that it was the latter. He was made for the 
work he was doing; he was obviously not made for 
the other. And to sum it up, I think that God 
puts us into the world to live, not necessarily to get 
influence over other people. If a man is worth 
anything, the influence comes; and I don't call it 
living to attend public luncheons, and to write 
unnecessary letters, because public luncheons are 
things which need not exist, and are only amuse- 
ments invented by fussy and idle people. I am not 
at all against people amusing themselves. But 
they ought to do it quietly and inexpensively, and 
not elaborately and noisily. The only thing that 
is certain is that men must work and eat and sleep 
and die. Well, I want them to enjoy their work, 
their food, their rest ; and then I should like them to 
enjoy their leisure hours peacefully and quietly. 



122 The Thread of Gold 

I have done as much in my twenty years of business 
as a man in a well-regulated state ought to do in the 
whole of his life ; and the rest I shall give, God will- 
ing, to leisure — not eating my cake in a corner, but 
in quiet good fellowship, with an eye and an ear 
for this wonderful and beautiful world." And 
my companion smiled upon me a large, gentle, en- 
gaging smile. 

" Yes," I said, " j'ou have answered well, and 
you have given me plenty to think about. And 
at all events you have a point of view, and that is a 
great thing." 

" Yes," said he, " a great thing, as long as one 
is not sure one is right, but ready to learn, and not 
desirous to teach. That is the mistake. We are 
children at school — we ought not to forget that ; but 
many of us want to sit in the master's chair, and rap 
the desk, and cane the other children." 

And so our talk wandered to other things; then 
we were silent for a little, while the birds came home 
to their roosts, and the trees shivered in the breeze 
of sunset; till at last the golden glow gathered in 
the west, and the sun went down in state behind the 
crimson line of sea. 

XXII 

I DESIRE to do a very sacred thing to-day: to 
enunciate a couple of platitudes and attest them. 



The Pleasures of Work 123 

It is always a solemn moment in life when one can 
sincerely subscribe to a platitude. Platitudes are 
the things which people of plain minds shout from 
the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend ; and 
to discover the truth of a platitude by experience 
means that you have climbed a step higher. 

The first enunciation is, that in this world we most 
of us do what we like. And the corollary to that 
is, that we most of us like what we do. 

Of course, we must begin by taking for granted 
that we most of us are obliged to do something. 
But that granted, it seems to me that it is very rare 
to find people who do not take a certain pleasure in 
their w^ork, and even secretly congratulate them- 
selves on doing it with a certain style and efficiency. 
To find a person who has not some species of pride 
of this nature is very rare. Other people may not 
share our opinion of our own work. But even in 
the case of those w^hose work is most open to criti- 
cism, it is almost invariable to find that they resent 
criticism, and are very ready to appropriate praise. 
I had a curiously complete instance of this the other 
day. In a parish which I often visit, the organ in 
the church is what is called presided over by the 
most infamous executant I have ever heard — an 
elderly man, who seldom plays a single chord cor- 
rectly, and whose attempts to use the pedals are of 
the nature of tentative and unsuccessful experi- 



124 The Thread of Gold 

ments. His performance has lately caused a con- 
siderable amount of indignation in the parish, for a 
new organ has been placed in the church, of far 
louder tone than the old instrument, and my friend 
the organist is hopelessly adrift upon it. The 
residents in the place have almost made up their 
minds to send a round-robin to the Vicar to ask 
that the pulsator organorum^ the beater of the or- 
gan, as old Cathedral statutes term him, may be 
deposed. The last time I attended service, one of 
those strangely appropriate verses came up in the 
course of the Psalms, which make troubled spirits 
feel that the Psalter does indeed utter a message to 
faithful individual hearts. " I have desired that 
they, even my enemies" ran the verse, "" should not 
triumph over me; for when my foot slipped, they 
rejoiced greatly against me" In the course of 
the verse the unhappy performer executed a per- 
fect fandango on the pedals. I looked guiltily 
at the senior churchwarden, and saw his mouth 
twitch. 

In the same afternoon I fell in with the organist, 
in the course of a stroll, and discoursed to him in a 
tone of gentle condolence about the difficulties of a 
new instrument. He looked blankly at me, and 
then said that he supposed that some people might 
find a change of instrument bewildering, but that 
for himself he felt equally at home on any instru- 



The Pleasures of Work 125 

ment. He went on to relate a series of compli- 
ments that well-known musicians had paid him, 
which I felt must either have been imperfectly 
recollected, or else must have been of a consolatory 
or even ironical nature. In five minutes, I discov- 
ered that my friend was the victim of an abundant 
vanity, and that he believed that his vocation in life 
was organ-playing. 

Again, I remember that, when I was a school- 
master, one of my colleagues was a perfect byword 
for the disorder and noise that prevailed in his 
form. I happened once to hold a conversation 
vvith him on disciplinary difficulties, thinking that 
he might have the relief of confiding his troubles 
to a sympathising friend. What was my amaze- 
ment when I discovered that his view of the situa- 
tion was, that every one was confronted with the 
same difficulties as himself, and that he obviously 
believed that he was rather more successful than 
most of us in dealing with them tactfully and 
strictly. 

I believe my principle to be of almost universal 
application ; and that if one could see into the heart 
of the people who are accounted, and rightly ac- 
counted, to be gross and conspicuous failures, we 
should find that they were not free from a certain 
pleasant vanity about their own qualifications and 
efficiency. The few people whom I have met who 



126 The Thread of Gold 

are apt to despond over their work are generally 
people who do it remarkably well, and whose ideal 
of efficiency is so high that they criticise severely 
in themselves any deviation from their standard. 
^Moreover, if one goes a little deeper — if, for in- 
stance, one cordially re-echoes their own criticisms 
upon their work — such criticisms are apt to be 
deeply resented. 

I will go further, and say that onlj^ once in the 
course of my life have I found a man who did his 
work really well, without any particular pride and 
pleasure in it. To do that implies an extraord- 
inary degree of will-power and self-command. 

I do not mean to say that, if any professional 
person found himself suddenly placed in the pos- 
session of an independent income, greater than he 
had ever derived from his professional work, his 
pleasure in his work would be sufficient to retain 
him in the exercise of it. We have most of us an 
unhappy belief in our power of living a pleasurable 
and virtuous life of leisure; and the desire to live 
what is called the life of a gentleman, which char- 
acter has lately been defined as a person who has no 
professional occupation, is very strong in the hearts 
of most of us. 

But, for all that, we most of us enjoy our work; 
the mere fact that one gains facility, and improves 
from day to day, is a source of sincere pleasure, 



The Pleasures of Work 127 

however far short of perfection our attempts may 
fall, and, generally speaking, our choice of a 
profession is mainly dictated by a certain feeling 
of aptitude for and interest in what we propose 
to undertake. 

It is, then, a happy and merciful delusion by 
which we are bound. We grow, I think, to love 
our work, and we grow, too, to believe in our method 
of doing it. We cannot, a great preacher once 
said, all delude ourselves into believing that we are 
richer, handsomer, braver, more distinguished than 
others ; but there are few of us who do not cherish a 
secret belief that, if only the truth were known, we 
should prove to be more interesting than others. 

To leave our work for a moment, and to turn to 
ordinary social intercourse. I am convinced that 
the only thing that can account for the large num- 
ber of bad talkers in the world is the wide-spread 
belief that prevails among individuals as to their 
power of contributing interest and amusement to a 
circle. One ought to keep this in mind, and bear 
faithfully and patiently the stream of tiresome talk 
that pours, as from a hose, from the lips of diffuse 
and lengthy conversationalists. I once made a ter- 
rible mistake. From the mere desire of saying 
something agreeable, and finding my choice of 
praiseworthy qualities limited I complimented an 
elderly, garrulous acquaintance on his geniality, on 



128 The Thread of Gold 

an evening when I had writhed uneasily under a 
steady downpour of talk. I have bitterly rued my 
insincerity. Not only have I received innumerable 
invitations from the man whom the Americans 
would call my complimentee, but when I am in his 
company I see him making heroic attempts to make 
his conversations practically continuous. How often 
since that day have I S3^mpathised with St. James 
in his eloquent description of the deadly and 
poisonous power of the tongue! A bore is not, as 
is often believed, a merely selfish and uninteresting 
person. He is often a man who labours conscien- 
tiously and faithfully at an accomplishment, the 
exercise of which has become pleasurable to him. 
And thus a bore is the hardest of all people to con- 
vert, because he is, as a rule, conscious of virtue and 
beneficence. 

On the whole, it is better not to disturb the 
amiable delusions of our fellow-men, unless we are 
certain that we can improve them. To break the 
spring of happiness in a virtuous bore is a serious 
responsibility. It is better, perhaps, both in mat- 
ters of work and in matters of social life, to en- 
courage our friends to believe in themselves. We 
must not, of course, encourage them in vicious and 
hurtful enjoj^ment, and there are, of course, bores 
whose tediousness is not only not harmless, but a 
positively noxious and injurious quality. There 



The Abbey 129 

are bores who have but to lay a finger upon a sub- 
ject of universal or special interest, to make one 
feel that under no circumstances will one ever be 
able to allow one's thoughts to dwell on the subject 
again; and such a person should be, as far as pos- 
sible, isolated from human intercourse, like a suf- 
ferer from a contagious malady. But this 
extremity of noxiousness is rare. And it may be 
said that, as a rule, one does more to increase hap- 
piness by a due amount of recognition and praise, 
even when one is recognising rather the spirit of a 
performance than the actual result; and such a 
course of action has the additional advantage of 
making one into a person who is eagerly welcomed 
and sought after in all kinds of society. 

XXIII 

The fresh wind blew cheerily as we raced, my 
friend and I, across a long stretch of rich fen-land. 
The sunlight, falling somewhat dimly through a 
golden haze, lay very pleasantly on the large pas- 
ture-fields. There are few things more beautiful, 
I think, than these great level plains ; they give one 
a delightful sense of space and repose. The dis- 
tant lines of trees, the far-off church towers, the 
long dykes, the hamlets half -hidden in orchards, the 
" sky-space and field-silence," give one a feehng of 



130 The Thre.u) of Gold 

quiet rustic life lived on a large and simple scale, 
which seems the natural life of the world. 

Our goal was the remains of an old religious 
house, now a farm. We were soon at the place; 
it stood on a very gentle rising-ground, once an 
island above the fen. Two great columns of the 
Abbey Church served as gate-posts. The house it- 
self lay a little back from the road, a comfortable 
cluster of big barns and outhouses, with great wal- 
nut trees all about, in the middle of an ancient tract 
of pasture, full of dimpled excavations, in which 
the turf grew greener and more compact. The 
farm-house itself, a large irregular Georgian build- 
ing covered ^\'ith rough orange plaster, showed a 
pleasant tiled roof among the barns, over a garden 
set with venerable sprawling box-trees. We found 
a friendly old labourer, full of simple talk, who 
showed us the orchard, with its mouldering wall of 
stone, pierced with niches, the line of drj^ stew- 
ponds, the refectory, now a great barn, piled high 
with heaps of grain and straw. We walked 
through byres tenanted by comfortable pigs rout- 
ing in the dirt. We hung over a paling to watch 
the creased and discontented face of an old hog, 
grunting in shrill anticipation of a meal. Our 
guide took us to the house, where we found a tran- 
sept of the church, now used as a brew-house, with 
the line of the staircase still visible, rising up to a 



The Abbey 131 

door in the wall that led once to the dormitory, 
down the steps of which, night after night, the shiv- 
ering and sleepy monks must have stumbled into 
their chilly church for prayers. The hall of the 
house was magnificent with great Norman arches, 
once the aisle of the nave. 

The whole scene had the busy, comfortable air 
of a place full of patriarchal life, the dignity of a 
thing existing for use and not for show, of quiet 
prosperity, of garnered provender and well-fed 
stock. Though it made no deliberate attempt at 
beauty, it was full of a seemly and homely charm. 
The face of the old fellow that led us about, chirp- 
ing fragments of local tradition, with a mild pride 
in the fact that strangers cared to come and see the 
place, wore the contented, weather-beaten look that 
comes of a life of easy labour spent in the open air. 
His patched gaiters, the sacking tied round him 
with a cord to serve as an apron, had the same sim- 
I3le appropriateness. We walked leisurely about, 
gathering a hundred pretty impressions, — as of the 
old filbert-trees that fringed the orchard, the wall- 
flowers, which our guide called the blood-warriors, 
on the ruined coping, a flight of pigeons turning 
with a sharp clatter in the air. At last he left us 
to go about his little business; and we, sitting on a 
broken mounting-block in the sunshine, gazed 
lazily and contentedly at the scene. 



132 The Thre^u) of Gold 

We attempted to picture something of the life 
of the Benedictines who built the house. It must 
have been a life of much quiet happiness. We tried 
to see in imagination the quaint clustered fabrics, 
the ancient church, the cloister, the barns, the out- 
buildings. The brethren must have suffered much 
from cold in winter. The day divided by services, 
the nights broken by prayers; probably the time 
was dull enough, but passed quickly, like all lives 
full of monotonous engagements. They were not 
particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted 
much on manual labour in the open air. Probably 
at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but 
as they grew richer, thej'^ employed labourers, and 
themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden- 
work. Perhaps some few were truly devotional 
spirits, with a fire of prayer and aspiration burning 
in their hearts; but the majoritj^ would be quiet 
men, full of little gossip about possible promotions, 
about lands and crops, about wayfarers and ecclesi- 
astics who passed that way and w^ere entertained. 
Very few, except certain officials like the Cellarer, 
who would have to ride to market, ever left the pre- 
cincts of the place, but laid their bones in the little 
graveyard east of the church. We make a mistake 
in regarding the life and the building as having 
been so picturesque, as they now appear after the 
long lapse of time. The church was more vener- 



The Abbey 133 

able than the rest; but the refectory, at the time of 
the dissolution, cannot have been long built; still, 
the old tiled place, with its rough stone walls, must 
have always had a quaint and irregular air. 

Probably it was as a rule a contented and ami- 
able society. The regular hours, the wholesome 
fatigue which the rule entailed, must have tended 
to keep the inmates in health and good-humour. 
But probably there was much tittle-tattle; and a 
disagreeable, jealous, or scheming inmate must 
have been able to stir up a good deal of strife in a 
society living at such close quarters. One thinks 
loosely that it must have resembled the life of a 
college at the University; but that is an entire mis- 
apprehension; for the idea of a college is liberty 
with just enough discipline to hold it together, 
while the idea of a monastery was discipline with 
just enough liberty to make life tolerable. 

Well, it is all over now! the idea of the monastic 
life, which was to make a bulwark for quiet-minded 
people against the rougher world, is no longer 
needed. The work of the monks is done. Yet I 
gave an affectionate thought across the ages to the 
old inmates of the place, whose bones have mould- 
ered into the dust of the yard where we sat. It 
seemed half -pleasant, half-pathetic to think of them 
as they went about their work, sturdy, cheerful fig- 
ures, looking out over the wide fen with all its clear 



134 The Thread of Gold 

pools and reed-beds, growing old in the familiar 
scene, passing from the dormitory to the infirmary, 
and from the infirmary to the graveyard, in a sure 
and certain hope. They too enjoyed the first 
breaking of spring, the return of balmy winds, the 
pushing up of the delicate flowers in orchard and 
close, with something of the same pleasure that I 
experience to-day. The same wonder that I feel, 
the same gentle thrill speaking of an unattainable 
peace, an unruffled serenity that lies so near me in 
the spring sunshine, flashed, no doubt, into those 
elder spirits. Perhaps, indeed, their heart went 
out to the unborn that should come after them, as 
my heart goes out to the dead to-day. 

And even the slow change that has dismantled 
that busy place, and established it as the quiet farm- 
stead that I see, holds a hope within it. There must 
indeed have been a sad time when the buildings 
were slipping into decay, and the church stood 
ruined and roofless. But how soon the scars are 
healed! How calmly nature smiles at the eager 
schemes of men, breaks them short, and then sets 
herself to harmonise and adorn the ruin, till she 
makes it fairer than before, writing her patient les- 
son of beauty on broken choir and tottering wall, 
flinging her tide of fresh life over the rents, and 
tenderly drawing back the broken fragments into 
her bosom. If we could not learn from her not to 



Wordsworth 135 

fret or grieve, to gather up what remains, to wait 
patiently and wisely for our change! 

So I reasoned softly to myself in a train of gentle 
thought, till the plough-horses came clattering in, 
and the labourers plodded gratefully home ; and the 
sun went down over the flats in a great glory of 
orange light. 

XXIV 

I BELIEVE that I was once taken to Rydal Mount 
as a small boy, led there meekly, no doubt, in a sort 
of dream ; but I retain not the remotest recollection 
of the place, except of a small flight of stone steps, 
which struck me as possessing some attractive qual- 
ity or other. And I have since read, I suppose, a 
good many descriptions of the place; but on visit- 
ing it, as I recently did, I discovered that I had not 
the least idea of what it was like. And I would 
here shortly speak of the extraordinary kindness 
which I received from the present tenants, who are 
indeed of the hallowed dynasty ; it may suffice to say 
that I could only admire the delicate courtesy which 
enabled people, who must have done the same thing 
a hundred times before, to show me the house with 
as much zest and interest, as if I was the first pil- 
grim that had ever visited the place. 

In the first place, the great simplicity of the 



136 The Thread of Gold 

whole struck me. It is like a little grange or farm. 
The rooms are small and low, and of a pleasant 
domesticity; it is a place apt for a patriarchal life, 
where simple people might live at close quarters 
with each other. The house is hardly visible from 
the gate. You turn out of a steep lane, embowered 
by trees, into a little gravel sweep, approaching the 
house from the side. But its position is selected 
with admirable art ; the ground falls steeply in front 
of it, and you look out over a wide valley, at the end 
of which Windermere lies, a tract of sapphire blue, 
among wooded hills and dark ranges. Behind, the 
ground rises still more steeply, to the rocky, grassy 
heights of Nab Scar; and the road leads on to a 
high green valley among the hills, a place of un- 
utterable peace. 

In this warm, sheltered nook, hidden in w^oods, 
with its southerly aspect, the vegetation grows ^^^th 
an almost tropical luxuriance, so that the general 
impression of the place is by no means typically 
English. Laurels and rhododendrons grow in 
dense shrubberies; the trees are full of leaf; flow- 
ers blossom profusely. There is a little orchard 
beneath the house, and everywhere there is the frag- 
grant and pungent smell of sun warmed garden- 
walks and box-hedges. There are little terraces 
everywhere, banked up with stone walls built into 
the steep ground, where stonecrops grow richly. 



Wordsworth 137 

One of these leads to a little thatched arbour, where 
the poet often sat; below it, the ground falls very 
rapidly, among rocks and copse and fern, so that 
you look out on to the tree-tops below, and catch a 
glimpse of the steely waters of the hidden lake of 
Rydal. 

Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty 
years; and half a century has passed since he died. 
He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I sup- 
pose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being 
constructed and the place laid out, it must have had 
a certain air of newness, of interference with the old 
wild peace of the hillside, which it has since parted 
with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled 
order, as if it had been thus for ever. One little de- 
tail deserves a special mention; just below the house, 
there is an odd, circular, low, grassy mound, said to 
be the old meeting-place for the village council, in 
primitive and patriarchal days, — the Mount, from 
which the place has its name. 

I thought much of the stately, simple, self-ab- 
sorbed poet, whom somehow one never thinks of as 
having been young ; the lines of Milton haunted me, 
as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces : — 

"In this mount he appeared; under this tree 
Stood visible ; among these pines his voice 
I heard ; here with him at this fountain talked." 

The place is all permeated with the thought of him. 



138 The Thre^vd of Gold 

his deep and tranquil worship of natural beauty, his 
love of the kindly earth. 

I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose 
memory evokes a deep personal attachment, I 
doubt if any figures of bygone days do that, unless 
there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless 
something of compassion, some wish to proffer 
sj^mpathy or consolation, mingles with one's rever- 
ence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house 
where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, half- 
miserable months. There, meditating about him, 
striving to reconstruct the picture of his life, one 
felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one 
would have wished to shelter, to protect him if 
it had been possible, or at least to have proffered 
sj'-mpathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart 
goes out to those Avho suffered long years ago, 
whose love of the earth, of life, of beauty, was per- 
petually overshadowed by the pain that comes from 
realising transitoriness and decay. 

But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. 
Pie was extraordinarily prosperous and equable; 
he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the sor- 
rows and bereavements that he had to bear were 
borne gently and philosophically. He knew ex- 
actly what he wanted to do, and did it. Those 
sturdy, useful legs of his bore him many a pleasant 
mile. He always had exactly as much mone}- as 



Wordsworth 139 

he needed, in order to live his hfe as he desired. He 
chose precisely the abode he preferred; his fame 
grew slowly and solidly. He became a great per- 
sonage ; he was treated with immense deference and 
respect. He neither claimed nor desired sympa- 
thy; he was as strong and self-reliant as the old 
yeomen of the hills, of whom he indeed was one; 
his vocation was poetry, just as their vocation was 
agriculture ; and this vocation he pursued in as busi- 
ness-like and intent a spirit as they pursued their 
farming. 

Wordsworth, indeed, was armed at all points by 
a strong and simple pride, too strong to be vanity, 
too simple to be egotism. He is one of the few 
supremely fortunate men in the history of litera- 
ture, because he had none of the sensitiveness or in- 
decision that are so often the curse of the artistic 
temperament. He never had the least misgivings 
about the usefulness of his life ; he wrote because he 
enjoyed it; he ate and drank, he strolled and talked, 
with the same enjoyment. He had a perfect bal- 
ance of physical health. His dreams never left 
him cold; his exaltations never plunged him into 
depression. He felt the mysteries of the world 
with a solemn awe, but he had no uneasy question- 
ings, no remorse, no bewilderment, no fruitless 
melancholy. 

He bore himself with the same homely dignity 



140 The Thread of Gold 

in all companies alike ; he was never particularly in- 
terested in any one ; he never had any fear of being 
thought ridiculous or pompous. His favourite 
reading was his own poetry ; he wished every one to 
be interested in his work, because he was conscious 
of its supreme importance. He probably made the 
mistake of thinking that it was his sense of poetry 
and beauty that made him simple and tranquil. As 
a matter of fact, it was the simplicit}'- and tran- 
quillity of his temperament that gave him the power 
of enjoyment in so large a measure. There is no 
growth or expansion about his life ; he did not learn 
his serene and impassive attitude through fail- 
ures and mistakes: it was his all along. 

And yet what a fine, pure, noble, gentle life it 
was! The very thought of him, faring quietly 
about among his hills and lakes, murmuring his 
calm verse, in a sober and temperate joy, looking 
everywhere for the same grave qualities among 
quiet, homekeeping folk, brings with it a high in- 
spiration. But we tend to think of Wordsworth 
as a father and a priest, ratlier than as a brother and 
a friend. He is a leader and a guide, not a com- 
rade. We must learn that, though he can perhaps 
turn our heart the right way, towards the right 
things, we cannot necessarily acquire that pure 
peace, that solemn serenity, by obeying his pre- 
cepts, unless we to have something of the same 



Wordsworth 141 

strong calmness of soul. In some moods, far from 
sustaining and encouraging us, the thought of his 
equable, impassioned life may only fill us with un- 
utterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely 
rooms, to have paced his little terraces, does bring 
a certain imagined peace into the mind, a noble 
shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for 
the conventional aims, the pitiful ambitions of the 
world. 

Alas, that the only sound from the little hill- 
platform, the embowered walks, should be the dull 
rolling of wheels — motors, coaches, omnibuses — in 
the road below! That is the shadow of his great- 
ness. It is a pitiable thought that one of the fruits 
of his genius is that it has made his holy retreat 
fashionable. The villas rise in rows along the edges 
of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where 
the feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. 
A stream of chattering, vacuous, indifferent tour- 
ists pours listlessly along the road from tahle-dfJiote 
to table-d'hote. The turbid outflow of the vulgar 
world seems a profanation of these august haunts. 
One hopes despairingly that something of the spirit 
of lonely beauty speaks to these trivial heads and 
hearts. But is there consolation in this? What 
would the poet himself have felt if he could have 
foreseen it all? 

I descended the hill-road and crossed the valley 



142 The Thread of Gold 

highway; it was full of dust; the vehicles rolled 
along, crowded with men smoking cigars and read- 
ing newspapers, tired women, children whose idea 
of pleasure had been to fill their hands with ferns 
and flowers torn from cranny and covert. I 
cHmbed the little hill opposite the great Scar; its 
green towering head, with its feet buried in wood, 
the hardy trees straggling up the front wherever 
they could get a hold among the grey crags, rose in 
sweet grandeur opposite to me. I threaded tracks 
of shimmering fern, out of which the buzzing flies 
rose round me; I went by silent, solitary places 
where the springs soak out of the moorland, while I 
pondered over the bewildering ways of the world. 
The life, the ideals of the great poet, set in the 
splendid framework of the great hills, seemed so 
majestic and admirable a thing. But the visible 
results — the humming of silly strangers round his 
sacred solitudes, the contaminating influence of 
commercial exploitation — made one fruitlessly and 
hopelessly melancholy. 

But even so the hills were silent; the sun went 
down in a great glory of golden haze among the 
shadowy ridges. The valleys lay out at my feet, 
the rolling woodland, the dark fells. There fell a 
mood of strange yearning upon me, a yearning for 
the peaceful secret tliat, as the orange sunset slowly 
waned, the great hills seemed to guard and hold. 



Dorsetshire 143 

What was it that was going on there, what solemn 
pageant, what sweet mystery, that I could only de- 
sire to behold and apprehend? I know not! I 
only know that if I could discern it, if I could tell 
it, the world would stand to listen; its littleness, its 
meanness, would fade in that august light; the 
peace of God would go swiftly and secretly abroad. 

XXV 

I AM travelling just now, and am this week at 
Dorchester, in the company of my oldest and best 
friend. We like the same things; and I can be 
silent if I will, while I can also say anything, how- 
ever whimsical, that comes in my mind; there are 
few things better than that in the world, and I 
count the precious hours very gratefully; appono 
lucro. 

Dorsetshire gives me the feeling of being a very 
old country. The big downs seem like the bases 
of great rocky hills which have through long ages 
been smoothed and worn away, softened and mel- 
lowed, the rocks, grain by grain, carried downwards 
into the flat alluvial meadowlands beneath. In 
these rich pastures, all intersected with clear 
streams, runnels, and water-courses, full at this sea- 
son of rich water-plants, the cattle graze peacefully. 
The downs have been ploughed and sown up to the 



144 The Thread of Gold 

sky-line. Then there are fine tracts of heather and 
pines in places. And then, too, there is a sense of 
old humanity, of ancient wars about the land. 
There are great camps and earth-works every- 
where, with ramparts and ditches, both British and 
Roman. The wolds from which the sea is visible 
are thickly covered with barrows, each holding the 
mouldering bones of some forgotten chieftain, laid 
to rest, how many centuries ago, with the rude 
mourning of a savage clan. I stood on one of the 
highest of these the other day, on a great gorse-clad 
headland, and sent my spirit out in quest of the old 
warrior that lay below — "Audisne haec, Am- 
phiarae, sub terram condite?" But there was no 
answer from the air; though in my sleep one night 
I saw a wild, red-bearded man, in a coat of skins, 
with rude gaiters, and a hat of foxes's fur on his 
head; he carried a long staff in his hand, pointed 
with iron, and looked mutely and sorrowfully upon 
me. Who knows if it was he? 

And then of later date are many ruinous strong- 
holds, with Cyclopean walls, like the huge shattered 
bulk of Corfe, upon its green hill, between the 
shoulders of great downs. There are broken ab- 
beys, pinnacled church-towers in village after vil- 
lage. And then, too, in hamlet after hamlet, rise 
quaint stone manors, high-gabled, many-mulHoned, 
in the midst of barns and byres. One of the sweet- 



Dorsetshire 145 

est places I have seen is Cerne Abbas. The road to 
it winds gently up among steep downs, a full stream 
gliding through flat pastures at the bottom. The 
hamlet has a forgotten, wistful air ; there are many- 
houses in ruins. Close to the street rises the church- 
tower, of rich and beautiful design, with gurgoyles 
and pinnacles, cut out of a soft orange stone and 
delicately weathered. At the end of the village 
stands a big farm-house, built out of the abbey 
ruins, with a fine oriel in one of the granaries. In 
a little wilderness of trees, the ground covered with 
primroses, stands the exquisite old gatehouse with 
muUioned windows. I have had for years a poor 
little engraving of the place, and it seemed to greet 
me like an old friend. Then, in the pasture above, 
you can see the old terraces and mounds of the 
monastic garden, where the busy Benedictines 
worked day by day ; further still, on the side of the 
down itself, is cut a very strange and ancient monu- 
ment. It is the rude and barbarous figure of a 
naked man, sixty yards long, as though moving 
northwards, and brandishing a huge knotted club. 
It is carved deep into the turf, and is overgrown 
with rough grass. No one can even guess at the 
antiquit)^ of the figure, but it is probably not less 
than three thousand years old. Some say that it 
records the death of a monstrous giant of the valley. 
The good monks Christianised it, and named it 



146 The Thread of Gold 

Augustine. But it seems to be certainly one of 
the frightful figures of which Caesar speaks, on 
which captives were bound with twisted osiers, and 
burnt to death for a Druidical sacrifice. The thing 
is grotesque, vile, horrible; the very stones of the 
place seem soaked with terror, cruelty, and death. 
Even recently foul and barbarous traditions were 
practised there, it is said, by villagers, who were 
Christian only in name. Yet it lay peace- 
fully enough to-day, the shadows of the clouds 
racing over it, the wind rustling in the grass, 
with nothing to break the silence but the twitter 
of birds, the bleat of sleep on the down, and the 
crying of cocks in the straw-thatched village 
below. 

What a strange fabric of history, memory, and 
tradition is here unrolled, of old unhappy far-off 
things! How bewildering to think of the horrible 
agonies of fear, the helpless, stupefied creatures ly- 
ing bound there, the smoke sweeping over them and 
the flames crackling nearer, while their victorious 
foes laughed and exulted round them, and the 
priests performed the last hideous rites. And all 
the while God watched the slow march of days f I'om 
the silent heaven, and worked out His mysterious 
purposes ! And yet, surveying the quiet valley to- 
day, it seems as though there were no memory of 
suffering or sorrow in it at all. 



Dorsetshire 147 

We climbed the down; and there at our feet the 
world lay like a map, with its fields, woods, hamlets, 
and church-towers, the great rich plain rolling to 
the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely 
minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, 
one's own thoughts, the schemes of one tiny moving 
atom on the broad back of the hills. And yet my 
own small restless identity is almost the only thing 
in the world of which I am assured! 

There came to me at that moment a thrill of the 
spirit which comes but rarely; a deep hope, the 
sense of a secret lying very near, if one could only 
grasp it; an assurance that we are safe and secure 
in the hand of God, and a certainty that there is a 
vast reality behind, veiled from us only by the 
shadows of fears, ambitions, and desires. And the 
thought, too, came that all the tiny human beings 
that move about their tasks in the plain beneath — 
nay, the animals, the trees, the flowers, every blade 
of grass, every pebble — each has its place in the 
great and awful mystery. Then came the sense of 
the vast fellowship of created things, the tender 
Fatherhood of the God who made us all. I can 
hardly put the thought into words; but it was one 
of those sudden intuitions that seem to lie deeper 
even than the mind and the soul, a message from the 
heart of the world, bidding one wait and wonder, 
rest and be still. 



148 The Thread of Gold 



XXVI 

I WILL put another little sketch side by side with 
the last, for the sake of contrast ; I think it is hardly 
possible within the compass of a few days to have 
seen two scenes of such minute and essential differ- 
ence. At Cerne I had the tranquil loneliness of the 
country-side, the silent valley, the long faintly- 
tinted lines of pasture, space, and stillness ; the ham- 
lets nestled among trees in the dingles of the down. 
To-day I went south along a dusty road; at first 
there were quiet ancient sights enough, such as the 
huge grass-grown encampment of Maiden Castle, 
now a space of pasture, but still guarded by vast 
ramparts and ditches, dug in the chalk, and for a 
thousand years or more deserted. The downs, 
where they faced the sea, were dotted with grassy 
barrows, air-swept and silent. We topped the hill, 
and in a moment there was a change; through the 
haze we saw the roofs of Weymouth laid out like a 
map before us, with the smoke drifting west from 
innumerable chimneys; in the harbour, guarded by 
the slender breakwaters, floated great ironclads, 
black and sinister bulks ; and beyond them frowned 
the dark front of Portland. Very soon the houses 
began to close in upon the road, — brick-built, pre- 
tentious, bow-windowed villas; then we were in the 



Portland 149 

streets, showing a wholesome antiquity in the broad- 
windowed mansions of mellow brick, which sprang 
into life when the honest king George III. made the 
quiet port fashionable by spending his simple sum- 
mers there. There was the king's lodging itself, 
Gloucester House, now embedded in a hotel, with 
the big pilastered windows of its saloons giving it a 
faded courtly air. Soon we were by the quays, with 
black red-funnelled steamers unloading, and all the 
quaint and pretty bustle of a port. We went out 
to a promontory guarded by an old stone fort, and 
watched a red merchant steamer roll merrily in, 
blowing a loud sea-horn. Then over a low- 
shouldered ridge, and we were by the great inner 
roads, full of shipping; we sat for a while by the 
melancholy wells of an ancient Tudor castle, now 
crumbling into the sea ; and then across the narrow 
causeway that leads on to Portland. On our right 
rose the Chesil Bank, that mysterious mole of 
orange shingle, which the sea, for some strange pur- 
pose of its own, has piled up, century after century, 
for eighteen miles along the western coast. And 
then the grim front of Portland Island itself loomed 
out above us. The road ran up steeply among the 
bluffs, through line upon line of grey-slated houses ; 
to the left, at the top of the cliff, were the sunken 
lines of the huge fort, with the long slopes of its 
earthworks, the glacis overgrown with grass, and 



150 The Thread of Gold 

the guns peeping from their embrasures; to the 
left, dipping to the south, the steep grey crags, 
curve after curve. The streets were aHve with an 
abundance of merry young sailors and soldiers, 
brisk, handsome boys, with the quiet air of dis- 
cipline that converts a countrj^ lout into a self- 
respecting citizen. An old bronzed sergeant led a 
child with one hand, and with the other tried to obey 
her shrill directions about whirling a skipping-rope, 
so that she might skip beside him; he looked at us 
with a half -proud, half-shamefaced smile, calling 
down a rebuke for his inattention from the girl. 

We wound slowl}'- up the steep roads smothered 
in dust; landwards the view was all drowned in a 
pale haze, but the steep grey cliffs by Lulworth 
gleamed with a tinge of gold across the sea. 

At the top, one of the dreariest landscapes I 
have ever seen met the sight. The island lies, so to 
speak, like a stranded whale, the great head and 
shoulders northwards to the land. The moment 
you surmount the top, the huge, flat side of the 
monster is extended before you, shelving to the sea. 
Hardly a tree grows there; there is nothing but a 
long perspective of fields, divided here and there 
by stone walls, with scattered grey houses at inter- 
vals. There is not a feature of any kind on which 
the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all 
tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretched in every 



Portland 151 

direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows- 
like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the 
top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of 
grey debris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge 
excavations, ugly ravines with a sj)out of grim 
stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings 
of some huge mole. The placid green slopes of the 
fort give an impression of secret strength, even 
grandeur. Otherwise it is but a ragged, splashed 
aquarelle of grey and green. Over the debris ap- 
pear at a distance the blunt ominous chimneys of 
the convict prison, which seems to put the finishing 
touch on the forbidding character of the scene. 

To-day the landward view was all veiled in haze, 
which seemed to shut off the sad island from the 
world. On a clear day, no doubt, the view must be 
full of grandeur, the inland downs, edged every- 
where with the tall scarped cliffs, headland after 
headland, with the long, soft line of the Chesil 
Bank below them. But on a day of sea mist, it 
must be, I felt, one of the saddest and most 
mournful regions in the world, with no sound 
but the wail of gulls, and the chafing of the surge 
below. 

XXVII 

To-day I had a singular pleasure heightened by 
an intermingled strangeness and even terror — 



152 The Thre^^d of Gold 

qualities ^vhich bring out the quality of pleasure in 
the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point pas- 
sage brings out the quality of what a German 
would, I think, call the over-work. I was at 
Canterhury, where the great central tower is 
wreathed with scaffolding, and has a dim, blurred 
outline from a distance, as though it were being 
rapidly shaken to and fro. I found a friendly 
and communicable man who offered to take me 
over it ; we climbed a dizzy little winding stair, with 
bright glimpses at intervals, through loopholes, of 
sunlight and wheeling birds; then we crept along 
the top of a vaulted space with great pockets of 
darkness to right and left. Soon we were in the 
gallery of the lantern, from which we could see the 
little people crawling on the floor beneath, like slow 
insects. And then we mounted a short ladder 
which took us out of one of the great belfry win- 
dows, on to the lowest of the planked galleries. 
What a frail and precarious structure it seemed: 
the planks bent beneath our feet. And here came 
the first exquisite delight — that of being close to the 
precipitous face of the tower, of seeing the carved 
work which had never been seen close at hand since 
its erection except by the jackdaws and pigeons. I 
was moved and touched by observing how fine and 
delicate all the sculpture was. There were rows 
and rows of little heraldic devices, which from be- 



Canterbury Tower 153 

low could appear only as tiny fretted points; yet 
every petal of rose or fieur-de-lys was as scrupu- 
lously and cleanly cut as if it had been meant to be 
seen close at hand; a waste of power, I suppose; 
but what a pretty and delicate waste! and done, I 
felt, in faithful days, when the carving was done as 
much to delight, if possible, the eye of God, as to 
please the eye of man. Higher and higher we went, 
till at last we reached the parapet. And then by a 
dizzy perpendicular ladder to which I committed 
myself in faith, we reached a little platform on the 
very top of one of the pinnacles. The vane had 
just been fixed, and the stone was splashed with the 
oozing solder. And now came the delight of the 
huge view all round : the wooded heights, the rolling 
hills; old church towers rose from flowering or- 
chards; a mansion peeped through immemorial 
trees; and far to the north-east we could see the 
white cliff of Pegwell Bay; endeared to me through 
the beautiful picture by Dyce, where the pale crags 
rise from the reefs green with untorn weeds. There 
on the horizon I could see shadowy sails on the 
steely sea-line. 

Near at hand there were the streets, and then 
the Close, with its comfortable canonical houses, 
in green trim gardens, spread out like a map at 
my feet. We looked down on to the tops of tall 
elm-trees, and saw the rooks walking and sitting 



154 The Thread of Gold 

on the grey-splashed platforms of twigs, that 
swayed horribly in the breeze. It was pleasant to 
see, as I did, the tiny figure of my reverend host 
walking, a dot of black, in his garden beneath, read- 
ing in a book. The long grey-leaded roof ran 
broad and straight, a hundred feet below. One felt 
for a moment as a God might feel, looking on a 
corner of his created world, and seeing that it was 
good. One seemed to have surmounted the earth, 
and to watch the little creeping orbits of men with 
a benevolent compassion, perceiving how strait they 
were. The large air hissed briskly in the pinnacles, 
and roared through the belfry windows beneath. 
I cannot describe the eager exhilaration which filled 
me ; but I guessed that the impulse which bids men 
fling themselves from such heights is not a morbid 
prepossession, not a physical dizziness, but an in- 
temperate and overwhelming joy. It seems at 
such a moment so easy to float and swim through 
the viewless air, as if one would be borne up on the 
wings of angels. 

But, alas! the hour warned us to return. On 
our way down we disturbed a peevish jackdaw 
from her nest; she had dragged up to that intoler- 
able height a pile of boughs that would have made 
a dozen nests; she had interwoven for the cup to 
hold her eggs a number of strips of purloined can- 
vas. There lay the three speckled eggs, the hope 



Prayer 155 

of the race, while the chiding mother stood on a 
pinnacle hard by, waiting for the intruder to 
begone. 

A strange sense of humiliation and smallness 
came upon me as we emerged at last into the nave; 
the people that had seemed so small and insignifi- 
cant, were, alas ! as big and as important as myself ; 
I felt as an exile from the porches of heaven, a 
fallen spirit. 

XXVIII 

I AM often baffled when I try to think what 
prayer is ; if our thoughts do indeed lie open before 
the eyes of the Father, like a little clear globe of 
water which a man may hold in his hand — and I am 
sure they do — it certainly seems hardly worth while 
to put those desires into words. JNIany good 
Christians seem to me to conceive of prayers partly 
as a kind of tribute they are bound to pay, and 
partly as requests that are almost certain to be re- 
fused. With such people religion, then, means 
the effort which they make to trust a Father who 
hears prayers, and very seldom answers them. 
But this does not seem to be a veiy reasonable 
attitude. 

I confess that liturgical prayer does not very 
much appeal to me. It does not seem to me to 



156 The Thread of Gold 

correspond to any particular need in my mind. It 
seems to me to sacrifice almost all the things that I 
mean by prayer — the sustained intention of soul, 
the laying of one's own problems before the Father, 
the expression of one's hopes for others, the desire 
that the sorrows of the world should be lightened. 
Of course, a liturgy touches these thoughts at many 
points; but the exercise of one's own liberty of as- 
piration and wonder, the pursuing of a train of 
thought, the quiet dwelling upon mysteries, are all 
lost if one has to stumble and run in a prescribed 
track. To follow a service with uplifted attention 
requires more mental agilit}^ than I possess; point 
after point is raised, and yet, if one pauses to medi- 
tate, to wonder, to aspire, one is lost, and misses the 
thread of the service. I suppose that there is or 
ought to be something in the united act of interces- 
sion. But I dislike all public meetings, and think 
them a waste of time. I should make an exception 
in favour of the Sacrament, but the rapid disap- 
pearance of the majority of a congregation before 
the solemn act seems to me to destroy the sense of 
unity with singular rapidity. As to the old theory 
that God requires of his followers that they should 
unite at intervals in presenting him M'ith a certain 
amount of complimentary effusion, I cannot even 
approach the idea. The holiest, simplest, most 
benevolent being of whom I can conceive would be 



Prayer 157 

inexpressibly pained and distressed by such an in- 
tention on the part of the objects of his care; and to 
conceive of God as greedy of recognition seems 
to me to be one of the conceptions which insult the 
dignity of the soul. 

I have heard lately one or two mediseval stories 
which illustrate what I mean. There is a story of 
a pious monk, who, worn out by long vigils, fell 
asleep, as he was saying his prayers before a cruci- 
fix. He was awakened by a buffet on the head, 
and heard a stern voice saying, " Is this an oratory 
or a dormitory? " I cannot conceive of any story 
more grotesquely human than the above, or more 
out of keeping with one's best thoughts about God. 
Again, there is a story which is told, I think, of one 
of the first monasteries of the Benedictine order. 
One of the monks was a lay brother, who had many 
little menial tasks to fulfil; he was a well-meaning 
man, but extremely forgetful, and he was often 
forced to retire from some service in which he was 
taking part, because he had forgotten to put the 
vegetables on to boil, or omitted other duties which 
would lead to the discomfort of the brethren. An- 
other monk, who was fond of more secular occupa- 
tions, such as wood-carving and garden-work, and 
not at all attached to habits of prayer, seeing this, 
thought that he would do the same ; and he too used 
to slip away from a service, in order to retui'n to the 



158 The Thread of Gold 

business that he loved better. The Prior of the 
monastery, an anxious, humble man, was at a loss 
how to act; so he called in a very holy hermit, who 
lived in a cell hard by, that he might have the bene- 
fit of his advice. The hermit came and attended an 
Office. Presently the lay brother rose from his 
knees and slipped out. The hermit looked up, fol- 
lowed him with his eyes, and appeared to be greatly 
moved. But he took no action, and only addressed 
himself more assiduously to his prayers. Shortly 
after, the other brother rose and went out. The 
hermit looked up, and seeing him go, rose too, and 
followed him to the door, where he fetched him a 
great blow upon the head that nearly brought him 
to the ground. Thereupon the stricken man went 
humbly back to his place and addressed himself to 
his prayers ; and the hermit did the same. 

The Office was soon over, and the hermit went to 
the Prior's room to talk the matter over. The her- 
mit said : " I bore in my mind what you told me, 
dear Father, and when I saw one of the brethren 
rise from his prayers, I asked God to show me what 
I should do ; but I saw a wonderful thing ; there was 
a shining figure with our brother, his hand upon the 
other's sleeve; and this fair comrade, I have no 
doubt, was an angel of God, that led the brother 
forth, that he might be about his Father's business. 
So I prayed the more earnestly. But when our 



Prayee 159 

other brother rose, I looked up; and I saw that he 
had been plucked by the sleeve by a little naked, 
comely boy, very swarthy of hue, that I saw had no 
business among our holy prayers ; he wore a mock- 
ing smile on his face, as though he prevailed in evil. 
So I rose and followed; and just as they came to 
the door, I aimed a shrewd blow, for it was told me 
what to do, at the boy, and struck him on the head, 
so that he fell to the ground, and presently went to 
his own place; and then our brother came back to 
his prayers." 

The Prior mused a little over this wonder, and 
then he said, smiling: " It seemed to me that it was 
our brother that was smitten." " Very like," said 
the hermit, " for the two were close together, and I 
think the boy was whispering in the brother's ear; 
but give God the glory; for the dear brother will 
not offend again." 

There is an abundance of truth in this whole- 
some ancient tale; but I will not draw the morals 
out here. All I will say is that the old theory of 
prayer, simple and childlike as it is, seems to have 
a curious vitality even nowadays. It presupposes 
that the act of prayer is in itself pleasing to God; 
and that is what I am not satisfied of. 

That theory seems to prevail even more strongly 
in the Roman Church of to-day than in our own. 
The Roman priest is not a man occupied primarily 



160 The Thre^vd of Gold 

with pastoral duties; his business is the business of 
prayer. To neglect his daily offices is a mortal sin, 
and when he has said them, his priestly duty is at 
an end. This does not seem to me to bear any rela- 
tion to the theory of prayer as enunciated in the 
Gospel. There the practice of constant and secret 
prayer, of a direct and informal kind, is enjoined 
upon all followers of Christ ; but Our Lord seems to 
be very hard upon the lengthy and public prayers 
of the Pharisees, and indeed against all formality 
in the matter at all. The only united service that 
he enjoined upon his followers was the Sacrament 
of the common meal ; and I confess that the saying 
of formal liturgies in an ornate building seems to 
me to be a practice which has drifted very far away 
from the simplicity of individual religion which 
Christ appears to have aimed at. 

JNIy own feeling about prayer is that it should 
not be relegated to certain seasons, or attended 
by certain postures, or even couched in definite 
language; it should rather be a constant uplifting 
of the heart, a stretching out of the hands to God. 
I do not think we should ask for definite things that 
we desire; I am sure that our definite desires, our 
fears, our plans, our schemes, the hope that visits 
one a hundred times a day, our cravings for wealth, 
our success or influence, are as easily read by God, 
as a man can discern the tiny atoms and filaments 



Prayer 161 

that swim in his crystal globe. But I think we may 
ask to be led, to be guided, to be helped; we may 
put our anxious little decisions before God ; we may 
ask for strength to fulfil hard duties; we may put 
our desires for others' happiness, our hopes for our 
country, our compassion for sorrowing or afflicted 
persons, our horror of cruelty and tyranny before 
him; and here I believe lies the force of prayer; 
that by practising this sense of aspiration in his 
presence, we gain a strength to do our own part. 
If we abstain from prayer, if we limit our prayers 
to our own small desires, we grow, I know, petty 
and self-absorbed and feeble. We can leave the 
fulfilment of our concrete aims to God; but we 
ought to be always stretching out our hands and 
opening our hearts to the high and gracious mys- 
teries that lie all about us. 

A friend of mine told me that a little Russian 
peasant, whom he had visited often in a military 
hospital, told him, at their last interview, that he 
would tell him a prayer that was always effective, 
and had never failed of being answered. " But 
you must not use it," he said, " unless you are in a 
great difficulty, and there seems no way out." The 
prayer which he then repeated was this : " Lord, 
remember King David, and all his grace." 

I have never tested the efficacy of this prayer, but 
I have a thousand times tested the efficacy of sud- 
si 



162 The Thread of Gold 

den prayer in moments of difficulty, when con- 
fronted with a little temptation, when overM'helmed 
with irritation, before an anxious interview, before 
writing a difficult passage. How often has the 
temptation floated away, the irritation mastered 
itself, the right word been said, the right sentence 
written! To do all we are capable of, and then to 
commit the matter to the hand of the Father, that is 
the best that we can do. 

Of course, I am well aware that there are many 
who find this kind of help in liturgical prayer; and 
I am thankful that it is so. But for myself, I can 
only say that as long as I pursued the customary 
path, and confined myself to fixed moments of 
prayer, I gained very little benefit. I do not forego 
the practice of liturgical attendance even now; for 
a solemn service, with all the majesty of an old and 
beautiful building full of countless associations, 
with all the resources of musical sound and cere- 
monial movement, does uplift and rejoice the soul. 
And even wdth simpler services, there is often some- 
thing vaguely sustaining and tranquillising in the 
act. But the deeper secret lies in the fact that 
prayer is an attitude of soul, and not a ceremony; 
that it is an individual mystery, and not a piece of 
venerable pomp. I would have every one adopt 
his own method in the matter. I would not for an 
instant discourage those who find that liturgical 



The Death-Bed of Jacob 163 

usage uplifts them; but neither would I have those 
to be discouraged who find that it has no meaning 
for them. The secret lies in the fact that our aim 
should be a relation with the Father, a frank and 
reverent confidence, a humble waiting upon God. 
That the Father loves all his children with an equal 
love I doubt not. But he is nearest to those who 
turn to him at every moment, and speak to him with 
a quiet trustfulness. He alone knows why he has 
set us in the middle of such a bewildering world, 
where joy and sorrow, darkness and light, are so 
strangely intermingled ; and all that we can do is to 
follow wisely and patiently such cases as he gives 
us, into the cloudy darkness in which he seems to 
dwell. 

XXIX 

I HEARD read the other morning, in a quiet house- 
chapel, a chapter which has always seemed to me 
one of the most perfectly beautiful things in the 
Bible. And as it was read, I felt, what is always 
a test of the highest kind of beauty, that I had never 
known before how perfect it was. It was the 48th 
chapter of Genesis, the blessing of Ephraim and 
JNIanasses. Jacob, feeble and spent, is lying in the 
quiet, tranquil passiveness of old age, with bygone 
things passing like dreams before the inner eye of 



164 The Thread of Gold 

the spirit — in that mood, I think, when one hardly 
knows where the imagined begins or the real ends. 
He is told that his son Joseph is coming, and he 
strengthens himself for an effort. Joseph enters, 
and, in a strain of high solemnity, Jacob speaks of 
the promise made long before on the stone-strewn 
hills of Bethel, and its fulfilment; but even so he 
seems to wander in his thought, the recollection of 
his Rachel comes over him, and he cannot forbear 
to speak of her: "And as for me, when I came from 
Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan, 
in the way, and when yet there was hut a little way 
to come nnto Ephrath; and I buried her there in the 
way of Ephrath; the same is Bethlehem." 

Could there be anything more human, more ten- 
der than that ? The memory of the sad day of loss 
and mouring, and then the gentle, aged precision 
about names and places, the details that add no- 
thing, and yet are so natural, so sweet an echo of 
the old tale, the symbols of the story, that stand 
for so much and mean so little, — " the same is Beth- 
lehem." Who has not heard an old man thus trac- 
ing out the particulars of some remote recollected 
incident, dwelling for the hundredth time on the 
unimportant detail, the side-issue, so needlessly 
anxious to avoid confusion, so bent on useless 
accuracy. 

Then, as he wanders thus, he becomes aware of 



The Death-Bed of Jacob 165 

the two boys, standing in wonder and awe beside 
him; and even so he cannot at once piece together 
the facts, but asks, with a sudden curiosity, " Who 
are these! " Then it is explained very gently by 
the dear son whom he had lost, and who stands 
for a parable of tranquil wisdom and loyal love. 
The old man kisses and embraces the boys, and with 
a full heart says, "I had not thought to see thy 
face; and lo, God hath showed vie also thy seed/' 
And at this Joseph can bear it no more, puts the 
boys forward, who seem to be clinging shyly to 
him, and bows himself down with his face to the 
earth, in a passion of grief and awe. 

And then the old man will not bless them as in- 
tended, but gives the richer blessing to the younger ; 
with those words which haunt the memory and sink 
into the heart : " The angel which redeemed me 
from all evil, bless the lads." And Joseph is moved 
by what he thinks to be a mistake, and would cor- 
rect it, so as to give the larger blessing to his first- 
born. But Jacob refuses. " I know it, my son, I 
know it . . . he also shall he great, hut truly 
his younger hrother shall he greater than he." 

And so he adds a further blessing ; and even then, 
at that deep moment, the old man cannot refrain 
from one flash of pride in his old prowess, and 
speaks, in his closing words, of the inheritance he 
won from the Amorite with his sword and bow ; and 



166 The Thread of Gold 

this is all the more human because there is no trace 
in the records of his ever having done anything of 
the kind. He seems to have been always a man of 
peace. And so the sweet story remains human to 
the very end. I care very little what the critics 
may have to say on the matter. They may call it 
legendary if they will, they may say that it is the 
work of an Ephraimite scribe, bent on consecrating 
the Ephraimite supremacy bj^ the aid of tradition. 
But the incident appears to me to be of a reality, a 
force, a tenderness, that is above historical criticism. 
Whatever else may be true, there is a breathing 
reality in the picture of the old weak patriarch mak- 
ing his last conscious effort; Joseph, that wise and 
prudent servant, whose activities have never 
clouded his clear natural affections; the boys, the 
mute and awed actors in the scene, not made to 
utter any precocious phrases, and yet centring the 
tenderness of hope and joy upon themselves. If it 
is art, it is the perfection of art, which touches the 
very heart-strings into a passion of sweetness and 
wonder. 

Compare this ancient story with other achieve- 
ments of the human mind and soul: with Homer, 
with Virgil, with Shakespeare. I think they pale 
beside it, because with no sense of effort or construc- 
tion, with all the homely air of a simple record, 
the perfectly natural, the perfectly pathetic, the 



The Sea or Galilee 167 

perfectly beautiful, is here achieved. There is no 
painting of effects, no dwelling on accessories, no 
consciousness of beauty; and yet the heart is fed, 
the imagination touched, the spirit satisfied. For 
here one has set foot in the very shrine of truth and 
beauty, and the wise hand that wrote it has just 
opened the door of the heart, and stands back, 
claiming no reward, desiring no praise. 

XXX 

I HAVE often thought that the last chapter of St. 
John's Gospel is one of the most bewildering and 
enchanting pieces of literature I know. I suppose 
Robert Browning must have thought so, because 
he makes the reading of it, in that odd rich poem. 
Bishop Blougranis Apology, the sign, together 
with testing a plough, of a man's conversion, from 
the unreal life of talk and words, to the realities of 
life; though I have never divined why he used this 
particular chapter as a symbol; and indeed I hope 
no one will ever make it clear to me, though I dare- 
say the connection is plain enough. 

It is bewildering, because it is a postscript, added, 
wdth a singular artlessness, after the Gospel has 
come to a full close. Perhaps St. John did not 
even write it, though the pretty childlike conclusion 
about the world itself not being able to contain the 



168 The Thread of Gold 

books that might be written about Christ has al- 
ways seemed to me to be in his spirit, the words of a 
very simple-minded and aged man. It is enchant- 
ing, because it contains two of the most beautiful 
episodes in the whole of the Gospel History, the 
charge to St. Peter to feed the lambs and sheep of 
the fold, where one of the most delicate nuances of 
language is lost in the English translation, and the 
appearance of Jesus beside the sea of Galilee. I 
must not here discuss the story of the charge to St. 
Peter, though I once heard it read, with exquisite 
pathos, when an archbishop of Canterbury M^as be- 
ing enthroned with all the pomp and circumstance 
of ecclesiastical ceremony, in such a way that it 
brought out, by a flash of revelation, the true spirit 
of the scene we were attending; we were simple 
Christians, it seemed, assembled only to set a shep- 
herd over a fold, that he might lead a flock in green 
pastures and by waters of comfort. 

But a man must not tell two tales at once, or 
he loses the savour of both. Let us take the other 
story. 

The dreadful incidents of the Passion are over; 
the shame, the horror, the humiliation, the disap- 
pointment. The hearts of the Apostles must have 
been sore indeed at the thought that they had de- 
serted their friend and Master. Then followed the 
mysterious incidents of the Resurrection, about 



The Sea of Galilee 169 

which I will only say that it is plain from the docu- 
ments, if they are accepted as a record at all, from 
the astonishing change which seems to have passed 
over the Apostles, converting their timid faithful- 
ness into a tranquil boldness, that they, at all events, 
believed that some incredibly momentous thing had 
happened, and that their Master was among them 
again, returning through the gates of Death. 

They go back, like men wearied of inaction, tired 
of agitated thought, to their homely trade. All 
night the boat sways in the quiet tide, but they catch 
nothing. Then, as the morning begins to come 
in about the promontories and shores of the lake, 
they see the figure of one moving on the bank, who 
hails them with a familiar heartiness, as a man 
might do who had to provide for unexpected guests, 
and had nothing to give them to eat. I fancy, I 
know not whether rightly, that they see in him a 
purchaser, and answer sullenly that they have 
nothing to sell. Then follows a direction, which 
they obey, to cast the net on the right side of the 
boat. Perhaps they thought the stranger — for it 
is clear that as yet they had no suspicion of his 
identity — had seen some sign of a moving shoal 
which had escaped them. They secure a great haul 
of fish. Then John has an inlding of the truth; 
and I know no words which thrill me more strangely 
than the simple expression that bursts from his lips : 



170 The Thread of Golu 

It is the Lord! With characteristic impetuosity 
Peter leaps into the water, and wades or swims 
ashore. 

And then comes another of the surprising touches 
of the story. As a mother might tenderly provide 
a meal for her husband and sons who have been out 
all night, they find that their visitant has made and 
lit a little fire, and is broiling fish, how obtained one 
knows not ; then the haul is dragged ashore, the big 
shoal leaping in the net ; and then follows the simple 
invitation and the distribution of the food. It 
seems as though that memorable meal, by the shore 
of the lake, with the fresh brightness of the morning 
breaking all about them must have been partaken 
of in silence ; one can almost hear the soft crackling 
of the fire, and the waves breaking on the shingle. 
They dared not ask him who he was: they knew; 
and yet, considering that they had only parted 
from him a few days before, the narrative implies 
that some mysterious change must have passed over 
him. Perhaps they were wondering, as we may 
wonder, how he was spending those days. He was 
seen only in sudden and unexpected glimpses; 
where was he living, what was he doing through 
those long nights and daj^s in which they saw him 
not? I can only say that for me a deep mystery 
broods over the record. The glimpses of him, and 
even more his absences, seem to me to transcend the 



The Apocalypse 171 

powers of human invention. That these men Uved, 
that they beHeved they saw the Lord, seems to me 
the only possible explanation, though I admit to 
the full the baffling mystery of it all. 

And then the scene closes with absolute sudden- 
ness ; there is no attempt to describe, to amplify, to 
analyse. There follows the charge to Peter, the 
strange prophecy of his death, and the still stranger 
repression of curiosity as to what should be the fate 
of St. John. 

But the whole incident, coming to us as it does 
out of the hidden ancient world, defying investiga- 
tion, provoking the deepest wonder, remains as 
faint and sweet as the incense of the morning, as 
the cool breeze that played about the weary brows 
of the sleepless fishermen, and stirred the long rip- 
ple of the clear lake. 

XXXI 

I THINK that there are few verses of the Bible 
that give one a more sudden and startling thrill 
than the verse at the beginning of the viiith chapter 
of the Revelation. And when he had opened the 
seventh seal there was silence in heaven about the 
space of half an hour. The very simplicity of the 
words, the homely note of specified time, is in itself 
deeply impressive. But further, it gives the dim 



172 The Thread of Gold 

sense of some awful and unseen preparation going 
forward, a period allowed in which those that stood 
by, august and majestic as they were, should collect 
their courage, should make themselves ready with 
bated breath for some dire pageant. Up to that 
moment the vision had followed hard on the open- 
ing of each seal. Upon the opening of the first, 
had resounded a peal of thunder, and the voice of 
the first beast had called the awestruck eyes and the 
failing heart to look upon the sight : Come and see! 
Then the white horse with the crowned conqueror 
had ridden joyfully forth. At the opening of the 
second seal, had sprung forth the red horse, and the 
rider with the great sword. ^Vhen the third was 
opened, the black horse had gone forth, the rider 
bearing the balances; and then had followed the 
strange and naive charge by the unknown voice, 
which gives one so strong a sense that the vision was 
being faithfully recorded rather than originated, 
the voice that quoted a price for the grain of wheat 
and barley, and directed the protection of the vine- 
yard and olive-yard. This homely reference to the 
simple food of earth keeps the mind intent upon the 
actual realities and needs of life in the midst of 
these bewildering sights. Then at the fourth open- 
ing, the pale horse, bestridden by Death, went 
mournfully abroad. At the fifth seal, the crowded 
souls beneath the altar cry out for restlessness ; they 



The Apocalypse 173 

are clothed in white robes, and bidden to be patient 
for a while. Then, at the sixth seal, falls the earth- 
quake, the confusion of nature, the dismay of men, 
before the terror of the anger of God ; and the very 
words the wrath of the Lamb, have a marvellous 
significance; the wrath of the Most Merciful, the 
wrath of one whose very symbol is that of a blithe 
and meek innocence. Then the earth is guarded 
from harm, and the faithful are sealed ; and in words 
of the sublimest pathos, the end of pain and sorrow 
is proclaimed, and the promise that the redeemed 
shall be fed and led forth by fountains of living wa- 
ters. And then, at the very moment of calm and 
peace, the seventh seal is opened, — and nothing fol- 
lows! the very angels of heaven seem to stand with 
closed eyes, compressed lips, and beating heart, 
waiting for what shall be. 

And then at last the visions come crowding be- 
fore the gaze again — the seven trumpets are 
sounded, the bitter, burning stars fall, the locusts 
swarm out from the smoking pit, and death and woe 
begin their work; till at last the book is delivered 
to the prophet, and his heart is filled with the sweet- 
ness of the truth. 

I have no desire to trace the precise significance 
of these things. I do not wish that these tapestries 
of wrought mysteries should be suspended upon the 
walls of history. I do not think that they can be so 



174 The Thke^u) of Gold 

suspended; nor have I the least hope that these 
strange sights, so full both of brightness and of 
horror, should ever be seen by mortal eye. But 
that a human soul should have lost itself in these 
august dreams, that the book of visions should have 
been thus strangely guarded through the ages, and 
at last, clothed in the sweet cadences of our English 
tongue, should be read in our ears, till the words are 
soaked through and through with rich wonder and 
tender associations — that is, I think, a very wonder- 
ful and divine thing. The lives of all men that have 
an inner eye for beauty are full of such mysteries, 
and surely there is no one, of those that strive to 
pierce below the dark experiences of life, who is not 
aware, as he reckons back the days of his life, of 
hours when the seals of the book have been opened. 
It has been so, I know, in my own life. Some- 
times, at the rending of the seal, a gracious thing 
has gone forth, bearing victory and prosperity. 
Sometimes a dark figure has ridden away, changing 
the very face of the earth for a season. Sometimes 
a thunder of dismay has followed, or a vision of 
sweet peace and comfort; and sometimes one has 
assuredly known that a seal has been broken, to be 
followed by a silence in heaven and earth. 

And thus these solemn and mournful visions re- 
tain a great hold over the mind; it is, with myself, 



The Apocalypse 175 

partly the childish associations of wonder and 
delight. One recurred so eagerly to the book, be- 
cause, instead of mere thought and argument, 
earthly events, wars and dynasties, here was a gal- 
lery of mysterious pictures, things seen out of the 
body, scenes of bright colour and monstrous forms, 
enacted on the stage of heaven. That is entranc- 
ing still ; but beyond and above these strange forms 
and pictured fancies, I now discern a deeper mys- 
tery of thought; not pure and abstract thought, 
flashes of insight, comforting grace, kindled de- 
sires, but rather that more complex thought that, 
through a perception of strange forms, a waving 
robe of scarlet, a pavement bright with jewels, a 
burning star, a bird of sombre plumage, a dark 
grove, breathes a subtle insight, like a strain of 
unearthly music, interpreting the hopes and fears 
of the heart by haunted glimpses and obscure signs. 
I do not know in what shadowy region of the soul 
these things draw near, but it is in a region which 
is distinct and apart, a region where the dreaming 
mind projects upon the dark its dimly-woven vis- 
ions; a region where it is not wise to wander too 
eagerly and carelessly, but into which one may look 
warily and intently at seasons, standing upon the 
dizzy edge of time, and gazing out beyond the flam- 
ing ramparts of the world. 



176 The Thread of Gold 

XXXII 

I SAW a strange and moving thing to-day. I 
went with a friend to visit a great house in the 
neighbourhood. The owner was away, but my 
friend enjoyed the right of leisurely access to the 
place, and we thought we would take the oppor- 
tunity of seeing it. 

We entered at the lodge, and walked through the 
old deer-park with its huge knotted oaks, its wide 
expanse of grass. The deer were feeding quietly 
in a long herd. The great house itself came in 
sight, with its portico and pavilions staring at us, so 
it seemed, blankly and seriously, with shuttered 
eyes. The whole place unutterably still and de- 
serted, like a house seen in a dream. 

There was one particular thing that we came 
to visit; we left the house on the left, and turned 
through a little iron gate into a thick grove of 
trees. We soon became aware that there was open 
ground before us, and presently we came to a space 
in the heart of the wood, where there was a silent 
pool all overgrown with water-lilies; the bushes 
grew thickly round the edge. The pool was full of 
water-birds, coots, and moor-hens, sailing aimlessly 
about, and uttering strange, melancholy cries at 
intervals. On the edge of the water stood a small 
marble temple, streaked and stained by the weather. 



The Statue 177 

As we approached it, my friend told me something 
of the builder of the little shrine. He was a former 
owner of the place, a singular man, who in his later 
days had lived a very solitary life here. He was a 
man of wild and wayward impulses, who had drunk 
deeply in youth of pleasure and excitement. He 
had married a beautiful young wife, who had died 
childless in the first year of their marriage, and he 
had abandoned himself after this event to a despair- 
ing seclusion, devoted to art and music. He had 
filled the great house with fine pictures, he had writ- 
ten a book of poems, and some curious stilted vol- 
umes of autobiographical prose; but he had no art 
of expression, and his books had seemed like a 
powerless attempt to give utterance to wild and 
melancholy musings; they were written in a 
pompous and elaborate style, which divested the 
thoughts of such charm as they might have 
possessed. 

He had lived thus to a considerable age in a wil- 
ful sadness, unloving and unloved. He had cared 
nothing for the people of the place, entertained no 
visitors; rambling, a proud solitary figure, about 
the demesne, or immured for days together in his 
library. Had the story not been true, it would 
have appeared like some elaborate fiction. 

He built this little temple in memory of the wife 
whom he had lost, and often visited it, spending 



178 The Thread of Gold 

hours on hot summer days wandering about the 
little lake, or sitting silent in the portico. We went 
up to the building. It was a mere alcove, open to 
the air. But what arrested my attention was a 
marble figure of a young man, in a sitting position, 
lightly clad in a tunic, the neck, arms, and knees 
bare; one knee was flung over the other, and the 
chin was propped on an arm, the elbow of which 
rested on the knee. The face was a wonderful and 
expressive piece of work. The boy seemed to be 
staring out, not seeing what he looked upon, but 
lost in a deep agony of thought. The face was won- 
derfully pure and beautiful ; and the anguish seemed 
not the anguish of remorse, but the pain of looking 
upon things both sweet and beautiful, and of yet 
being unable to take a share in them. The whole 
figure denoted a listless melancholy. It was the 
work of a famous French sculptor, who seemed to 
have worked under close and minute direction; and 
my friend told me that no less than three statues 
had been completed before the owner was satisfied. 
On the pedestal were sculptured the pathetic 
words, Oi/ioi flak' av6L<i. There was a look of re- 
volt of dumb anger upon the face that lay behind 
its utter and hopeless sadness. I knew too well, by 
a swift instinct, what the statue stood for. Here 
was one, made for life, activity, and joy, who yet 
found himself baffled, thwarted, shut out from the 



The Statue 179 

paradise that seemed to open all about him; it was 
the face of one who had found satiety in pleasure, 
and sorrow in the very heart of joy. There was no 
taint of grossness or of luxury in the face, but rather 
a strength, an intellectual force, a firm lucidity of 
thought. I confess that the sight moved me very 
strangely. I felt a thrill of the deepest compas- 
sion, a desire to do something that might help or 
comfort, a yearning wish to aid, to explain, to 
cheer. The silence, the stillness, the hopelessness 
of the pathetic figure woke in me the intensest de- 
sire to give I knew not what — an overwhelming 
impulse of pity. It seemed a parable of all the joy 
that is so sternly checked, all the hopes made vain, 
the promise disappointed, the very death of the soul. 
It seemed infinitely pathetic that God should have 
made so fair a thing, and then withheld joy. And 
it seemed as though I had looked into the very soul 
of the unhappy man who had set up so strange and 
pathetic an allegory of his sufferings. The boy 
seemed as though he would have welcomed death — 
anything that brought an end; yet the health and 
suppleness of the bright figure held out no hope of 
that. It was the very type of unutterable sorrow, 
and that not in an outworn body, and reflected in a 
face dim with sad experience, but in a perfectly 
fresh and strong frame, built for action and life. 
I cannot say what remote thoughts, what dark com- 



180 The Thre^vd of Gold 

munings, visited me at the sight. I seemed con- 
fronted all at once with the deepest sadness of the 
world, as though an unerring arrow had pierced my 
very heart — an arrow winged by beauty, and shot 
on a summer day of sunshine and song. 

Is there any faith that is strong enough and deep 
enough to overcome such questionings? It seemed 
to bring me near to all those pale and hopeless 
agonies of the world; all the snapping short of joy, 
the confronting of life with death — those dreadful 
moments when the heart asks itself, in a kind of 
furious horror, " How can it be that I am filled so 
full of all the instinct of joy and life, and yet bidden 
to suffer and to die? " 

The only hope is in an utter and silent resigna- 
tion; in the belief that, if there is a purpose in the 
gift of joy, there is a purpose in the gift of suffer- 
ing. And as thus, in that calm afternoon, in the 
silent wood, by the shining pool, I lifted up my 
heart to God to be consoled, I felt a great hope 
draw near, as when the vast tide flows landward, 
and fills the dry, solitary sand-pools with the leap- 
ing brine. " Only wait," said the deep and tender 
voice, " only endure, only believe; and a sweetness, 
a beauty, a truth beyond your utmost dreams shall 
be revealed." 



The Mystery of Suffering 181 

XXXIII 

Here is a story which has much occupied my 
thoughts lately. A man in middle life, with a 
widowed sister and her children depending on him, 
living by professional exertions, is suddenly at- 
tacked by a painful, horrible, and fatal complaint. 
He goes through a terrible operation, and then 
struggles back to his work again, with the utmost 
courage and gallantry. Again the complaint re- 
turns, and the operation is repeated. After this he 
returns again to his work, but at last, after endur- 
ing untold agonies, he is forced to retire into an 
invalid life, after a few months of which he died 
in terrible suffering, and leaves his sister and the 
children nearly penniless. 

The man was a quiet, simple-minded person, fond 
of his work, fond of his home, conventional and not 
remarkable except for the simply heroic quality he 
displayed, smiling and joking up to the moment of 
the administering of ansesthetics for his operations, 
and bearing his sufferings with perfect patience and 
fortitude, never saying an impatient word, grateful 
for the smallest services. 

His sister, a simple, active woman, with much 
tender affection and considerable shrewdness, find- 
ing that the fear of incurring needless expense dis- 
tressed her brother, devoted herself to the ghastly 



182 The Thread of Gold 

and terrible task of nursing him through his ill- 
nesses. The children behaved with the same 
straightforward affection and goodness. None of 
the circle ever complained, ever said a word which 
would lead one to suppose that they had any feeling 
of resentment or cowardice. They simply received 
the blows of fate humbly, resignedly, and cheer- 
fully, and made the best of the situation. 

Xow, let us look this story in the face, and see if 
we can derive any hope or comfort from it. In the 
first place, there was nothing in the man's life which 
would lead one to suppose that he deserved or 
needed this special chastening, this crucifixion of 
the body. He was b}-^ instinct humble, laborious, 
unselfish, and good, all of which qualities came out 
in his illness. Neither was there anj^thing in the 
life or character of the sister which seemed to need 
this stern and severe trial. The household had lived 
a very quiet, active, useful life, models of good citi- 
zens — religious, contented, drawing great happi- 
ness from very simple resources. 

One's belief in the goodness, the justice, the pa- 
tience of the Father and oNIaker of men forbids one 
to believe that he can ever be wantonly cruel, un- 
just, or unloving. Yet it is impossible to see the 
mercy or justice of his actions in this case. And 
the misery is that, if it could be proved that in one 
single case, however small, God's goodness had, so 



The Mystery of Suffering 183 

to speak, broken down; if there were evidence of 
neglect or carelessness or indifference, in the case of 
one single child of his, one single sentient thing that 
he has created, it would be impossible to believe in 
his omnipotence any more. Either one would feel 
that he was unjust and cruel, or that there was some 
evil power at work in the world which he could not 
overcome. 

For there is nothing remedial in this suffering. 
The man's useful, gentle life is over, the sister is 
broken down, unhappy, a second time made de- 
solate; the children's education has suffered, their 
home is made miserable. The only thing that one 
can see, that is in any degree a compensation, is 
the extraordinary kindness displayed by friends, re- 
lations, and employers in making things easy for 
the afflicted household. And then, too, there is the 
heroic quality of soul displayed by the sufferer him- 
self and his sister — a heroism which is ennobling to 
think of, and yet humiliating too, because it seems 
to be so far out of one's own reach. 

This is a very dark abyss of the world into which 
we are looking. The case is an extreme one per- 
haps, but similar things happen every day, in this 
sad, and wonderful, and bewildering world. Of 
course, one may take refuge in a gloomy acquies- 
cence, saying that such things seem to be part of the 
world as it is made, and we cannot explain them, 



184 The Thread of Gold 

while we dumbly hope that we may be spared such 
M oes. But that is a dark and despairing attitude, 
and, for one, I cannot live at all, unless I feel that 
God is indeed more upon our side than that. I 
cannot live at all, I say. And yet I must live; I 
must endure the Will of God in whatever form it is 
laid upon me — in joy or in pain, in contentment or 
sick despair. Why am I at one with the Will of 
God when it gives me strength, and hope, and de- 
light ? Why am I so averse to it when it brings me 
languor, and sorrow, and despair? That I cannot 
tell; and that is the enigma which has confronted 
men from generation to generation. 

But I still believe that there is a Will of God; 
and, more than that, I can still believe that a day 
comes for all of us, however far off it may be, when 
we shall understand ; when these tragedies, that now 
blacken and darken the very air of Heaven for us, 
will sink into their places in a scheme so august, so 
magnificent, so joyful, that we shall laugh for won- 
der and delight; when we shall think not more sor- 
rowfully over these sufferings, these agonies, than 
Ave think now of the sad daj^s in our childhood when 
we sat with a passion of tears over a broken toy or a 
dead bird, feeling that we could not be comforted. 
We smile as we remember such things — we smile at 
our blindness, our limitations. We smile to reflect 
at the great range and panorama of the world that 



Music 185 

has opened upon us since, and of which, in our 
childish grief, we were so ignorant. Under what 
conditions the glory will be revealed to us I cannot 
guess. But I do not doubt that it will be revealed; 
for we forget sorrow, but we do not forget joy. 

XXXIV 

I HAVE just come back from hearing a great 
violinist, who played, with three other professors, 
in two quartettes, Mozart and Beethoven. I know 
little of the technicalities of music, but I know that 
the Mozart was full to me of air and sunlight, and 
a joy which was not the light-hearted gaiety of 
earth, but the untainted and unwearying joy of 
heaven; the Beethoven I do not think I understood, 
but there was a grave minor movement, with pizzi- 
cato passages for the violoncello, which seemed to 
consecrate and dignify the sorrow of the heart. 

But apart from the technical merits of the music 
— and the performance, indeed, seemed to me to 
lie as near the thought and the conception as the 
translation of music into sound can go — the sight 
of these four big men, serious and grave, as though 
neither pursuing nor creating pleasure, but as 
though interpreting and giving expression to some 
weighty secret, had an inspiring and solemnising 
effect. The sight of the great violinist himself was 
full of awe ; his big head, the full grey beard which 



186 The Thread of Gold 

lay over the top of the violin, his calm, set brows, 
his weary eyes with their heavy lids, had a profound 
dignity and seriousness; and to see his wonderful 
hands, not delicate or slender, but full, strong, and 
muscular, moving neither lingeringly nor hastily, 
but with a firm and easy deliberation upon the 
strings, was deeply impressive. It all seemed so 
easy, so inevitable, so utterly without display, so 
simple and great. It gave one a sense of mingled 
fire and quietude, which is the end of art, — one may 
almost say the end of life; it was no leaping and 
fitful flame, but a calm and steady glow ; not a con- 
suming fire, but like the strength of a mighty fur- 
nace ; — and then the peace of it ! The great man did 
not stand before us as a performer; he seemed 
utterly indifferent to praise or applause, and he 
had rather a grave, pontifical air, as of a priest, 
divinely called to minister, celebrating a divine mys- 
tery, calling down the strength of heaven to earth. 
Neither was there the least sense of one conferring 
a favour; he rather appeared to recognise that we 
were there in the same spirit as himself, the wor- 
shippers in some high solemnity, and his own skill 
not a thing to be shown or gloried in, but a mere 
ministering of a sacred gift. He seemed, indeed, to 
be like one who distributed a sacramental meat to 
an intent throng; not a giver of pleasure, but a 
channel of secret grace. 



Music 187 

From such art as this one comes away not only 
with a thrill of mortal rapture, but with a real and 
deep faith in art, having bowed the head before a 
shrine, and having tasted the food of the spirit. 
When, at the end of a sweet and profound move- 
ment, the player raised his great head and looked 
round tenderly and gently on the crowd, one felt as 
though, like Moses, he had struck the rock, and the 
streams had gushed out, ut hibat impulus. And 
there fell an even deeper awe, which seemed to say, 
" God was in this place . . . and I knew it 
not." The world of movement, of talk, of work, 
of conflicting interests, into which one must return, 
seemed all a fantastic noise, a shadowy striving ; the 
only real thing seemed the presence-chamber from 
which we had gone out, the chamber in which music 
had uttered its voice at the bidding of some sacred 
spell, the voice of an infinite Spirit, the Spirit that 
had brooded upon the deep, evoking order out of 
chaos and light out of darkness ; with no eager and 
dusty manoeuvrings, no clink and clatter of human 
toil, but gliding resistlessly and largely upon the 
M^orld, as the sun by silent degrees detaches himself 
from the dark rim of the world, and climbs in stately 
progress into the unclouded heaven. 

XXXV 

I READ a terrible letter in a newspaper this morn- 



188 The Thre.u) of Gold 

ing, a letter from a clergyman of high position, 
finding fault with a manifesto put out by certain 
other clergymen ; the letter had a certain volubility 
about it, and the writer seemed to me to pull out 
rather adroitly one or two loose sticks in his op- 
ponents' bundle, and to lay them vehemently about 
their backs. But, alas! the acrimony, the positive- 
ness, the arrogance of it I 

I do not know that I admired the manifesto very 
much myself; it was a timid and half-hearted docu- 
ment, but it was at least sympathetic and tender. 
The purport of it was to say that, just as historical 
criticism has shown that some of the Old Testament 
must be regarded as fabulous, so we must be pre- 
pared for a possible loss of certitude in some of the 
details of the New Testament. It is conceivable, 
for instance, that without sacrificing the least por- 
tion of the essential teaching of Christ, men may 
come to feel justified in a certain suspension of 
judgment with regard to some of the miraculous 
occurrences there related ; may even grow to believe 
that an element of exaggeration is there, that ele- 
ment of exaggeration which is never absent from 
the writings of any age in which scientific historical 
methods had no existence. A suspension of judg- 
ment, say : because in the absence of any converging 
historical testimony to the events of the New Testa- 
ment, it will never be possible either to affirm or to 



The Faith of Christ 189 

deny historically that the facts took place exactly 
as related; though, indeed, the probability of their 
having so occurred may seem to be diminished. 

The controversialist, whose letter I read with be- 
wilderment and pain, involved his real belief in in- 
genious sentences, so that one would think that he 
accepted the statements of the Old Testament, such 
as the account of the Creation and the Fall, the 
speaking of Balaam's Ass, the swallowing of Jonah 
by the whale, as historical facts. He w^ent on to 
say that the miraculous element of the New Testa- 
ment is accredited by the Revelation of God, as 
though some definite revelation of truth had taken 
place at some time or other, which all rational men 
recognised. But the only objective process which 
has ever taken place is, that at certain Councils of 
the Church, certain books of Scripture were se- 
lected as essential documents, and the previous 
selection of the Old Testament books was con- 
firmed. But would the controversialist say that 
these Councils were infallible? It must surely be 
clear to all rational people that the members of 
these Councils were merely doing their best, under 
the conditions that then prevailed, to select the books 
that seemed to them to contain the truth. It is im- 
possible to believe that if the majority at these Coun- 
cils had supposed that such an account as the ac- 
count in Genesis of the Creation was mythological. 



190 The Thre.vd of Gold 

they would thus have attested its hteral truth. 
It never occurred to them to doubt it, because they 
did not understand the principle that, while a 
normal event can be accepted, if it is fairly well 
confirmed, an abnormal CA^ent requires a far greater 
amount of converging testimonj^ to confirm it. 

If only the clergy could realise that what ordi- 
nary laymen like myself want is a greater elasticity 
instead of an irrational certainty! if only instead 
of feebly trying save the outworks, which are al- 
ready in the hands of the enemy, they would man 
the walls of the central fortress! If only they would 
say plainly that a man could remain a convinced 
Christian, and yet not be bound to hold to the literal 
accuracy of the account of miraculous incidents re- 
corded in the Bible, it would be a great rehef. 

I am myself in the position of thousands of other 
laymen. I am a sincere Christian; and yet I re- 
gard the Old Testament and the New Testament 
alike as the work of fallible men and of poetical 
minds. I regard the Old Testament as a noble 
collection of ancient writings, containing myths, 
chronicles, fables, poems, and dramas, the value of 
which consists in the intense faith in a personal God 
and Father with which it is penetrated. 

AVhen I come to the New Testament, I feel my- 
self, in the Gospels, confronted by the most wonder- 
ful personality which has ever drawn breath upon 



The Faith of Christ 191 

the earth. I am not in a position to affirm or to 
deny the exact truth of the miraculous occurrences 
there related; but the more conscious I am of the 
faUibihty, the lack of subtlety, the absence of 
trained historical method that the writers display, 
the more convinced I am of the essential truth of 
the person and teaching of Christ, because he seems 
to me a figure so infinitely beyond the intellectual 
power of those who described him to have invented 
or created. 

If the authors of the Gospels had been men of 
delicate literary skill, of acute philosophical or 
poetical insight, like Plato or Shakespeare, then I 
should be far less convinced of the integral truth of 
the record. But the words and sayings of Christ, 
the ideas which he disseminated, seem to me so in- 
finitely above the highest achievements of the hu- 
man spirit, that I have no difficulty in confessing, 
humbly and reverently, that I am in the presence of 
one who seems to me to be above humanity, and not 
only of it. If all the miraculous events of the Gos- 
pels could be proved never to have occurred, it 
would not disturb my faith in Christ for an instant. 
But I am content, as it is, to believe in the possi- 
bility of so abnormal a personality being sur- 
rounded by abnormal events, though I am not in a 
position to disentangle the actual truth from the 
possibilities of misrepresentation and exaggeration. 



192 The Thread of Gold 

Dealing with the rest of the New Testament, I 
see in the Acts of the Apostles a deeply interesting 
record of the first ripples of the faith in the world. 
In the Pauline and other epistles I see the words of 
fervent primitive Christians, men of real and un- 
tutored genius, in which one has amazing instances 
of the effect produced, on contemporary or nearly 
contemporary persons, of the same overwhelming 
personality, the personality of Christ. In the Apoc- 
alypse I see a vision of deep poetical force and 
insight. 

But in none of these compositions, though they 
reveal a glow and fervour of conviction that places 
them high among the memorials of the human 
spirit, do I recognise anything which is beyond 
human possibilities. I observe, indeed, that St. 
Paul's method of argument is not always perfectly 
consistent, nor his conclusions absolutely cogent. 
Such inspiration as they contain they draw from 
their nearness to and their close apprehension of the 
dim and awe-inspiring presence of Christ himself. 

If, as I say, the Church would concentrate her 
forces in this inner fortress, the personality of 
Christ, and quit the debatable ground of historical 
enquiry, it would be to me and to many an un- 
feigned relief; but meanwhile, neither scientific 
critics nor irrational pedants shall invalidate my 
claim to be of the number of believing Christians. 



The Faith of Christ 193 

I claim a Christian liberty of thought, while I ac- 
knowledge, with bowed head, my belief in God the 
Father of men, in a Divine Christ, the Redeemer 
and Saviour, and in the presence in the hearts of 
men of a Divine spirit, leading humanity tenderly 
forward. I can neither affirm nor deny the literal 
accuracy of Scripture records; I am not in a posi- 
tion to deny the superstructure of definite dogma 
raised by the tradition of the Church about the cen- 
tral truths of its teaching, but neither can I deny 
the possibility of an admixture of human error in 
the fabric. I claim my right to receive the Sacra- 
ments of my Church, believing as I do that they 
invigorate the soul, bring the presence of its Re- 
deemer near, and constitute a bond of Christian 
unity. But I have no reason to believe that any 
human pronouncement whatever, the pronounce- 
ments of men of science as well as the pronounce- 
ments of theologians, are not liable to error. There 
is indeed no fact in the world except the fact of 
my own existence of which I am absolutely certain. 
And thus I can accept no system of religion which 
is based upon deductions, however subtle, from 
isolated texts, because I cannot be sure of the in- 
fallibility of any form of human expression. Yet, 
on the other hand, I seem to discern with as much 
certainty as I can discern anything in this world, 
where all is so dark, the presence upon earth at a 
13 



194 The Thre^id of Gold 

certain date of a personality which commands my 
homage and allegiance. And upon this I build my 
trust. 

XXXVI 

I WAS staying the other day in a large old coun- 
try-house. One morning, my host came to me and 
said: " I should like to show you a curious thing. 
We have just discovered a cellar here that seems 
never to have been visited or used since the house 
was built, and there is the strangest fungoid growth 
in it I have ever seen." He took a big bunch of 
keys, rang the bell, gave an order for lights to be 
brought, and we went together to the place. There 
were ranges of brick-built, vaulted chambers, 
through which we passed, pleasant, cool places, with 
no plaster to conceal the native brick, with great 
wine-bins on either hand. It all gave one an ink- 
ling of the change in material conditions which 
must have taken place since they were built; the 
quantity of wine consumed in eighteenth-century 
days must have been so enormous, and the difficulty 
of conveyance so great, that every great householder 
must have felt like the liich Fool of the parable, 
with much goods laid up for many j^ears. In the 
corner of one of the great vaults was a low arched 
door, and my friend explained that some panelling 



The Mystery of Evil 195 

which had been taken out of an older house, de- 
molished to make room for the present mansion, had 
been piled up here, and thus the entrance had been 
hidden. He unlocked the door, and a strange scent 
came out. An abundance of lights were lit, and 
we went into the vault. It was the strangest scene 
I have ever beheld ; the end of the vault seemed like 
a great bed, hung with brown velvet curtains, 
through the gaps of which were visible what seemed 
like white velvet pillows, strange humped conglom- 
erations. My friend explained to me that there 
had been a bin at the end of the vault, out of the 
wood of which these singular fungi had sprouted. 
The whole place was uncanny and horrible. The 
great velvet curtains swayed in the current of air, 
and it seemed as though at any moment some mys- 
terious sleeper might be awakened, might peer 
forth from his dark curtains, with a fretful enquiry 
as to why he was disturbed. 

The scene dwelt in my mind for many days, and 
aroused in me a strange train of thought ; these dim 
vegetable forms, with their rich luxuriance, their 
sinister beauty, awoke a curious repugnance in the 
mind. They seemed unholy and evil. And yet 
it is all part of the life of nature; it is just as nat- 
ural, just as beautiful to find life at work in this 
gloomy and unvisited place, wreathing the bare walls 
with these dark, soft fabrics. It was impossible 



196 The Thread of Gold 

not to feel that there was a certain joy of life in 
these growths, sprouting with such security and 
luxuriance in a place so precisely adapted to their 
well-being; and yet there was the shadow of death 
and darkness about them, to us whose home is the 
free air and the sun. It seemed to me to make a 
curious parable of the baffling mystery of evil, the 
luxuriant growth of sin in the dark soul. I have 
always felt that the reason why the mystery of evil 
is so baffling is because we so resolutely think of evil 
as of something inimical to the nature of God; and 
yet evil must derive its vitality from him. The one 
thing that it is impossible to believe is that, in a 
world ruled by an all-powerful God, anything 
should come into existence which is in opposition 
to his Will. It is impossible to arrive at any solu- 
tion of the difficulty, unless we either adopt the be- 
lief that God is not all-powerful, and that there is a 
real dualism in nature, two powers in eternal op- 
position; or else realise that evil is in some waj'^ a 
manifestation of God. If we adopt the first 
theory, we may conceive of the stationary tendency 
in nature, its inertness, the force that tends to bring 
motion to a standstill, as one power, the power of 
Death; and we may conceive of all motion and 
force as the other power, the quickening spirit, the 
power of life. But even here we are met with a 
difficulty, for when we try to transfer tliis dualism 



The Mystery of Evil 197 

to the region of humanitj^ we see that in the pheno- 
mena of disease we are confronted, not with inert- 
ness fighting against motion, but with one kind of 
life, which is inimical to human life, fighting with 
another kind of life which is favourable to health. 
I mean that when a fever or a cancer lays hold of a 
human frame, it is nothing but the lodging inside 
the body of a bacterial and an infusorial life which 
fights against the healthy native life of the human 
organism. There must be, I will not say a con- 
sciousness, but a sense of triumphant life, in the 
cancer which feeds upon the limb, in spite of all 
efforts to dislodge it; and it is impossible to me to 
believe that the vitality of those parasitical organ- 
isms, which prey upon the human frame, is not 
derived from the vital impulse of God. We, who 
live in the free air and the sun, have a way of think- 
ing and speaking as if the plants and animals which 
develop under the same conditions were of a healthy 
tj^pe, while the organisms which flourish in decay 
and darkness, such as the fungi of which I saw so 
strange an example, the larvae which prey on decay- 
ing matter, the soft and pallid worm-like forms 
that tunnel in vegetable ooze, were of an unhealthy 
type. But yet these creatures are as much the 
work of God as the flowers and trees, the brisk ani- 
mals which we love to see about us. We are ob- 
liged in self-defence to do battle with the creatures 



198 The Thread of Gold 

which menace our health; we do not question our 
right to deprive them of hfe for our own comfort; 
but surely with this analogy before us, we are 
equally compelled to think of the forms of moral 
evil, with all their dark vitality, as the work of God's 
hand. It is a sad conclusion to be obliged to draw, 
but I can have no doubt that no comprehensive sys- 
tem of philosophy can ever be framed, which does 
not trace the vitality of what we call evil to the same 
hand as the vitality of what we call good. I have 
no doubt myself of the supremacy of a single 
power; but the exj^lanation that evil came into the 
world by the institution of free-will, and that suffer- 
ing is the result of sin, seems to me to be wholly 
inadequate, because the mystery of strife and pain 
and death is " far older than any history which is 
written in any book." The mistake that we make 
is to count up all the qualities which seem to pro- 
mote our health and happiness, and to invent an 
anthropomorphic figure of God, whom we array 
upon the side which we wish to prevail. The truth 
is far darker, far sterner, far more mysterious. The 
darkness is his not less than the light; selfishness 
and sin are the work of his hand, as much as un- 
selfishness and holiness. To call this attitude of 
mind pessimism, and to say that it can only end in 
acquiescence or despair, is a sin against truth. A 
creed that does not take this thought into account is 



Renew Ai. 199 

nothing but a delusion, with which we try to be- 
guile the seriousness of the truth which we dread; 
but such a stern belief does not forbid us to strug- 
gle and to strive ; it rather bids us believe that effort 
is a law of our natures, that we are bound to be en- 
listed for the fight, and that the only natures that 
fail are those that refuse to take a side at all. 

There is no indecision in nature, though there is 
some illusion. The very star that rises, pale and 
serene, above the darkening thicket, is in reality a 
globe wreathed in fiery vapour, the centre of a 
throng of whirling planets. What we have to do 
is to see as deep as we can into the truth of things, 
not to invent paradises of thought, sheltered gar- 
dens, from which grief and suffering shall tear us, 
naked and protesting; but to gaze into the heart of 
God, and then to follow as faithfully as we can the 
imperative voice that speaks within the soul. 

XXXVII 

There sometimes falls upon me a great hunger 
of heart, a sad desire to build up and renew some- 
thing — a broken building it may be, a fading flower, 
a failing institution, a ruinous character. I feel a 
great and vivid pity for a thing which sets out to 
be so bright and beautiful, and lapses into shapeless 
and uncomely neglect. Sometimes, indeed, it must 



200 The Thread of Gold 

be a desolate grief, a fruitless sorrow: as when a 
flower that has stood on one's table, and cheered the 
air with its freshness and fragrance, begins to 
droop, and to grow stained and sordid. Or I see 
some dying creature, a wounded animal; or even 
some well-loved friend under the shadow of death, 
with the hue of health fading, the dear features 
sharpening for the last change; and then one can 
only bow, with such resignation as one can muster, 
before the dreadful law of death, pray that the pas- 
sage may not be long or dark, and try to dream of 
the bright secrets that may be waiting on the other 
side. 

But sometimes it is a more fruitful sadness, when 
one feels that decay can be arrested, that new life 
can be infused ; that a fresh start may be taken, and 
a life may be beautifully renewed, and be even the 
brighter, one dares to hope, for a lapse into the 
dreary ways of bitterness. 

This sadness is most apt to beset those who have 
anything to do with the work of education. One 
feels sometimes, with a sudden shiver, as when the 
shadow of a cloud passes over a sunlit garden, that 
many elements are at work in a small society; that 
an evil secret is spreading over lives that were peace- 
ful and contented, that suspicion and disunion and 
misunderstanding are springing up, like poisonous 
weeds, in the quite corner that God has given one 



Renewal 201 

to dress and keep. Then perhaps one tries to put 
one's hand on what is amiss; sometimes one does 
too much, and in the wrong way ; one has not enough 
faith, one dares not leave enough to God. Or from 
timidity or diffidence, or from the base desire not to 
be troubled, from the poor hope that perhaps things 
will straighten themselves out, one does too little; 
and that is the worst shadow of all, the shadow of 
cowardice or sloth. 

Sometimes, too, one has the grief of seeing a slow 
and subtle change passing over the manner and face 
of one for whom one cares — not the change of 
languor or physical w^eakness ; that can be pityingly 
borne; but one sees innocence withering, indiffer- 
ence to things wholesome and fair creeping on, 
even sometimes a ripe and evil sort of beauty ma- 
turing, such as comes of looking at evil unashamed, 
and seeing its strong seductiveness. One feels in- 
stinctively that the door which had been open be- 
fore between such a soul and one's own spirit is 
being slowly and firmly closed, or even, if one at- 
tempts to open it, pulled to with a swift motion; 
and then one may hear sounds within, and even see, 
in that moment, a rush of gliding forms, that makes 
one sure that a visitant is there, who has brought 
with him a wicked company; and then one has to 
wait in sadness, with now and then a timid knock- 
ing, even happy, it may be, if the soul sometimes 



202 The Thread of Gold 

call fretfully within, to say that it is occupied and 
cannot come forth. 

But sometimes, God be praised, it is the other way. 
A year ago a man came at his own request to see 
me. I hardly knew him; but I could see at once 
that he was in the grip of some hard conflict, which 
withered his natural bloom. I do not know how 
all came to be revealed; but in a little while he was 
speaking with simple frankness and naturalness of 
all his troubles, and they were many. What was 
the most touching thing of all was that he spoke as 
if he were quite alone in his experience, isolated and 
shut off from his kind, in a peculiar horror of dark- 
ness and doubt; as if the thoughts and difficulties 
at which he stumbled had never strewn a human 
path before. I said but little to him; and, indeed, 
there was but little to say. It was enough that he 
should " cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous 
stuff that weighs upon the heart." I tried to make 
him feel that he was not alone in the matter, and 
that other feet had trodden the dark path before 
him. No advice is possible in such cases; " therein 
the patient must minister to himself "; the solution 
lies in the mind of the sufferer. He knows M'hat he 
ought to do; the difficulty is for him sufficiently to 
desire to do it; yet even to speak frankly of cares 
and troubles is very often to melt and disperse the 
morbid mist that gathers round them, which grows 



Renewal 203 

in solitude. To state them makes them plain and 
simple ; and, indeed, it is more than that ; for I have 
often noticed that the mere act of formulating one's 
difficulties in the hearing of one who sympathises 
and feels, often brings the solution with it. One 
finds, like Christian in Doubting Castle, the key 
which has lain in one's bosom all the time — the key 
of Promise; and when one has finished the recital 
one is lost in bewilderment that one ever was in any 
doubt at all. 

A year has passed since that date, and I have had 
the happiness of seeing health and contentment 
stream back into the man's face. He has not over- 
come, he has not won an easy triumph ; but he is in 
the way now, not wandering on trackless hills. 

So, in the mood of which I spoke at first — the 
mood in which one desires to build up and renew 
— one must not yield one's self to luxurious and pa- 
thetic reveries, or allow one's self to muse and won- 
der in the half-lit region in which one may beat one's 
wings in vain — the region, I mean, of sad stupefac- 
tion as to why the world is so full of broken 
dreams, shattered hopes, and unfulfilled possibili- 
ties. One must rather look round for some little 
definite failure that is within the circle of one's 
vision. And even so, there sometimes comes what 
is the most evil and subtle temptation of all, which 
creeps upon the mind in lowly guise, and preaches 



204 The Thread of Gold 

inaction. What concern have you, says the tempt- 
ing voice, to meddle with the hves and characters 
of others — to guide, to direct, to help — when there 
is so much that is bitterly amiss with your own heart 
and life? How will you dare to preach what you 
do not practise? The answer of the brave heart is 
that, if one is aware of failure, if one has suffered, 
if one has gathered experience, one must be ready 
to share. If I falter and stumble under my own 
heavy load, which I have borne so querulously, so 
clumsily, shall not I say a word which can help a 
fellow-sufferer to bear his load more easily, help 
him to avoid the mistakes, the falls into which my 
own perversit}^ has betrayed me? To make an- 
other's burden lighter is to lighten one's own bur- 
den; and, sinful as it may be to err, it is still more 
sinful to see another err and be silent, to withhold 
the word that might save him. Perhaps no one can 
help so much as one that has suffered himself, who 
knows the turns of the sad road, and the trenches 
which beset the way. 

For thus comes most truly the joy of repentance; 
it is joy to feel that one's own lesson is learned, and 
that the feeble feet are a little stronger; but if one 
may also feel that another has taken heed, has been 
saved the fall that must have come if he had not 
been M^arned, one does not grudge one's own pain, 
that has brought a blessing with it, that is outside 



The Secret 205 

of one's own blessing ; one hardly even grudges the 
sin. 

XXXVIII 

I HAVE been away from my books lately, in a 
land of downs and valleys; I have walked much 
alone, or with a silent companion — that greatest 
of all luxuries. And, as is always the case when 
I get out of the reach of books, I feel that I read 
a great deal too much, and do not meditate enough. 
It sounds indolent advice to say that one ought to 
meditate; but I cannot help feeling that reading is 
often a still more indolent affair. When I am 
alone, or at leisure among my books I take a vol- 
ume down; and the result is that another man does 
my thinking for me. It is like putting one's self in a 
comfortable railway carriage; one runs smoothly 
along the iron track, one stops at specified stations, 
one sees a certain range of country, and an abund- 
ance of pretty things in flashes — too many, indeed, 
for the mind to digest; and that is the reason, I 
think, why a modern journey, even with all the 
luxuries that surround it, is so tiring a thing. But 
to meditate is to take one's own path among the 
hills; one turns off the track to examine anything 
that attracts the attention; one makes the most of 
the few things that one sees. 



206 The Thread of Gold 

Reading is often a mere saving of trouble, a 
soporific for a restless brain. This last week, as 
I say, I have had very few books with me. One 
of the few has been Milton's Paradise Lost, and 
I have read it from end to end. I want to say a 
few words about the book first, and then to diverge 
to a larger question. I have read the poem with a 
certain admiration; it is a large, strong, rugged, 
violent thing. I have, however, read it without 
emotion, except that a few of the similes in it, which 
lie like shells on a beach of sand, have pleased me. 
Yet it is not true to say that I have read it without 
emotion, because I have read it with anger and in- 
dignation. I have come to the conclusion that the 
book has done a great deal of harm. It is respon- 
sible, I think, for a great many of the harsh, busi- 
ness-like, dismal views of religion that prevail 
among us. JNlilton treated God, the Saviour, and 
the angels, from the point of view of a scholar who 
had read the Iliad. I declare that I think that the 
passages where God the Father speaks, discusses 
the situation of affairs, and arranges matters with 
the Saviour, are some of the most profane and 
vicious passages in English literature. I do not 
want to be profane myself, because it is a disgusting 
fault ; but the passage where the scheme of Redemp- 
tion is arranged, where God enquires whether any 
of the angels will undergo death in order to satisfy 



The Secret 207 

his sense of injured justice, is a passage of what I 
can only call stupid brutality, disguised, alas, in 
the solemn and majestic robe of sonorous language. 
The angels timidly decline, and the Saviour volun- 
teers, which saves the shameful situation. The 
character of God, as displayed by Milton, is that of 
a commercial, complacent, irritable Puritan. There 
is no largeness or graciousness about it, no wistful 
love. He keeps his purposes to himself, and when 
his arrangements break down, as indeed they de- 
serve to do, some one has got to be punished. If 
the guilty ones cannot, so much the worse; an in- 
nocent victim will do, but a victim there must be. 
It is a wicked, an abominable passage, and I would 
no more allow an intelligent child to read it than 
I would allow him to read an obscene book. 

Then, again, the passage where the rebel angels 
cast cannon, make gunpowder, and mow the good 
angels down in rows, is incredibly puerile and ridic- 
ulous. The hateful materialism of the whole thing 
is patent. I wish that the English Church could 
have an Index, and put Paradise Lost upon it, and 
allow no one to read it until he had reached years of 
discretion, and then only with a certificate, and for 
purely literary purposes. 

It is a terrible instance how strong a thing Art is ; 
the grim old author, master of every form of ugly 
vituperation, had drifted miserably away from his 



208 The Thre^ud of Gold 

beautiful youth, when he wrote the sweet poems and 
sonnets that make the pedestal for his fame; and 
on that delicate pedestal stands this hideous iron 
figure, with its angry gestures, its sickening 
strength. 

I could pile up indignant instances of the further 
harm the book has done. Who but JNIilton is re- 
sponsible for the hard and shameful view of the 
position of woman? He represents her as a cling- 
ing, soft, compliant creature, whose onlj^ ideal is to 
be to make things comfortable for her husband, and 
to submit to his embraces. INIilton spoilt the lives 
of all the women he had to do with, by making them 
into slaves, with the same consciousness of rectitude 
with which he whipped his nephews, the sound of 
whose cries made his poor girl-wife so miserable. 
But I do not want to go further into the question 
of INIilton himself. I want to follow out a wider 
thought which came to me among the downs to-day. 

There seems to me to be in art, to take the 
metaphor of the temple at Jerusalem, three grada- 
tions or regions, which may be typified by the Court, 
the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies. Into the 
Court many have admittance, both M'riters and 
readers; it is just shut off from the world, but ad- 
mittance is easy and common. All who are moved 
and stirred by ideas and images can enter here. 
Then there is the Holy Place, dark and glorious. 



The Secret 209 

where the candlestick ghmmers and the altar 
gleams. And to this place the priests of art have 
access. Here are to be found all delicate and 
strenuous craftsmen, all who understand that there 
are secrets and mysteries in art. They can please 
and thrill the mind and ear; they can offer up a 
fragrant incense; but the full mystery is not re- 
vealed to them. Here are to be found many grace- 
ful and soulless poets, many writers of moving 
tales, and discriminating critics, who are satisfied, 
but cannot satisfy. Those who frequent this place 
are generally of opinion that they know all that is 
to be known; they talk much of form and colour, 
of values and order. They can make the most of 
their materials; and indeed their skill outruns their 
emotion. 

But there is the inmost shrine of all within, where 
the darkness broods, lit at intervals by the shining 
of a divine light, that glimmers on the ark and 
touches the taper wings of the adoring angels. The 
contents indeed of the sacred chest are of the 
simplest ; a withered branch, a pot of food, two slabs 
of grey stone, obscurely engraved. Nothing rich 
or rare. But those who have access to the inner 
shrine are face to face with the mystery. Some 
have the skill to hint it, none to describe it. And 
there are some, too, who have no skill to express 
themselves, but who have visited the place, and 



210 The Thread of Gold 

bring back some touch of radiance gushing from 
their brows. 

IMilton, in his youth, had looked within the shrine, 
but he forgot, in the clamorous and sordid world, 
what he had seen. Only those who have visited the 
Holiest place know those others who have set foot 
there, and they cannot err. I cannot define exactly 
what it is that makes the difference. It cannot be 
seen in performance; for here I will humbly and 
sincerely make the avowal that I have been within 
the veil myself, though I know not when or how. 
I learned there no perfection of skill, no methods of 
expression. But ever since, I have looked out for 
the signs that tell me whether another has set foot 
there or no. I sometimes see the sign in a book, or 
a picture ; sometimes it comes out in talk ; and some- 
times I discern it in the glance of an eye, for all the 
silence of the lips. It is not knowledge, it is not 
pride that the access confers. Indeed it is often a 
sweet humility of soul. It is nothing definite; but 
it is a certain attitude of mind, a certain quality of 
thought. Some of those who have been within are 
very sinful persons, very unhappy, very unsatis- 
factory, as the world would say. But they are 
never perverse or wilful natures; they are never 
cold or mean. Those in whom coldness and mean- 
ness are found are of necessity excluded from the 
Presence. But though the power to step behind 



The Secret 211 

the veil seldom brings serenity, or strength, or con- 
fidence, yet it is the best thing that can happen 
to a man in the world. 

Some perhaps of those who read these words will 
think that it is all a vain shadow, and that I am but 
wrapping up an empty thought in veils of words. 
But though I cannot explain, though I cannot say 
what the secret is, I can claim to be able to say al- 
most without hesitation whether a human spirit has 
passed within; and more than that. As I write 
these words, I know that if any who have set foot in 
the secret shrine read them, they will under- 
stand, and recognise that I am speaking a simple 
truth. 

Some, indeed, find their M^ay thither through re- 
ligion; but none whose religion is like Milton's. 
Indeed, part of the wonder of the secret is the in- 
finite number of paths that lead there; they are all 
lonely; the moment is unexpected; indeed, as was 
the case with myself, it is possible to set foot within, 
and yet not to know it at the time. 

It is this secret which constitutes the innermost 
brotherhood of the world. The innermost, I say, 
because neither creed, nor nationality, nor occupa- 
tion, nor age, nor sex affects the matter. It is dif- 
ficult, or shall I say unusual, for the old to enter; 
and most find the way there in youth, before 
habit and convention have become tyrannous, 



212 The Thread of Gold 

and have fenced the path of life with hedges and 
walls. 

Again it is the most secret brotherhood of the 
world; no one can dare to make public proclama- 
tion of it, no one can gather the saints together, for 
the essence of the brotherhood is its isolation. One 
may indeed recognise a brother or a sister, and that 
is a blessed moment; but one must not speak of it 
in words; and indeed there is no need of words, 
where all that matters is known. It may be asked 
what are the benefits which this secret brings. It 
does not bring laughter, or prosperity, or success, 
or even cheerfulness; but it brings a high, though 
fitful, joy — a joy that can be captured, practised, 
retained. No one can, I think, of set purpose, cap- 
ture the secret. No one can find the way by desir- 
ing it. And yet the desire to do so is the seed of 
hope. And if it be asked, why I write and print 
these veiled words about so deep and intimate a 
mystery, I would reply that it is because not all who 
have found the way, know that they have found it; 
and my hope is that these words of mine may show 
some restless hearts that they have found it. For 
one may find the shrine in youth, and for want of 
knowing that one has found it, m^ay forget it in 
middle age; and that is what I sorrowfully think 
that not a few of my brothers do. And the sign 
of such a loss is that such persons speak contempt- 



The Secret 213 

uously and disdainfully of their visions, and try to 
laugh and deride the young and gracious out of 
such hopes ; which is a sin that is hateful to God, a 
kind of murder of souls. 

And now I have travelled a long way from where 
I began, but the path was none of my own making. 
It was Milton, that fierce and childish poet, that 
held open the door, and within I saw the ladder, at 
the fierv head of which is God himself. And like 
Jacob (who was indeed of our company) I made a 
pillow for my head of the stones of the place, that I 
might dream more abundantly. 

And so, as I walked to-day among the green 
places of the down, I made a prayer in my heart to 
God, the matter of which I will now set down; and 
it was that all of us who have visited that most Holy 
Place may be true to the vision ; and that God may 
reveal us to each other, as we go on pilgrimage ; and 
that as the world goes forward, he may lead more 
and more souls to visit it, that bare and secret place, 
which yet holds more beauty than the richest palace 
of the world. For palaces but hold the outer 
beauty in types and glimpses and similitudes. 
While in secret shrine we visit the central fountain- 
head, from which the water of life, clear as crystal, 
breaks in innumerable channels, and flows out from 
beneath the temple door, as Ezekiel saw it flow, 
lingering and delaying, but surely coming to glad- 



214 The Thread of Gold 

den the earth. I could indeed go further, and speak 
many things out of a full heart about the matter. 
I could quote the names of many poets and artists, 
great and small ; and I could say which of them be- 
longs to the inner company, and which of them is 
outside. But I will not do this, because it would 
but set inquisitive people puzzling and wondering, 
and trying to guess the secret; and that I have no 
desire to do; because these words are not written 
to make those who do not understand to be curious ; 
but they are written to those who know, and, most 
of all, to those who know but have forgotten. No 
one may traffic in these things ; and indeed there is 
no opportunity to do so. I could learn in a mo- 
ment, from a sentence or a smile, if one had the 
secret; and I could spend a long summer day try- 
ing to explain it to a learned and intelligent person, 
and yet give no hint of what I meant. For the 
thing is not an intelligible process, a matter of rea- 
soning and logic; it is an intuition. And therefore 
it is that those who cannot believe in anything that 
they do not understand, will think these words of 
mine to be folly and vanity. The only case where 
I have found a difficulty in deciding, is when I talk 
to one who has lived much with those who had the 
secret, and has caught, by a kind of natural imita- 
tion, some of the accent and cadence of the truth. 
An old friend of mine, a pious woman, used in her 



The Secret 215 

last days to have prayers and hymns read much in 
her room; there was a parrot that sat there in his 
cage, very silent and attentive; and not long after, 
when the parrot was ill, he used to mutter prayers 
and hymns aloud, with a devotion that would have 
deceived the very elect. And it is even so with the 
people of whom I have spoken. Not long ago I 
had a long conversation with one, a clever woman, 
who had lived much in the house of a man who had 
seen the truth; and I was for a little deceived, and 
thought that she also knew the truth. But sud- 
denly she made a hard judgment of her own, and I 
knew in a moment that she had never seen the 
shrine. 

And now I have said enough, and must make 
an end. I remember that long ago, when I was a 
boy, I painted a picture on a panel, and set it in 
my room. It was the figure of a kneeling youth on 
a hillock, looking upwards; and beyond the hillock 
came a burst of rays from a hidden sun. Under- 
neath it, for no reason that I can well explain, I 
painted the words <J30)<i iOeaa-a/xriv km efx^o(3o^ ^v — I be- 
held a light and was afraid. I was then very far 
indeed from the sight of the truth ; but I know now 
that I was prophesying of what should be ; for the 
secret sign of the mystery is a fear, not a timid and 
shrinking fear, but a holy and transfiguring awe. 
I httle guessed what would some day befall me; 



216 The Thread of Gold 

but now that I have seen, I can only say with all 
my heart that it is better to remember and be sad, 
than to forget and smile. 

XXXIX 

I WAS awakened this morning, at the old house 
where I am staying, by low and sweet singing. 
The soft murmur of an organ was audible, on which 
some clear trebles seemed to swim and float — one 
voice of great richness and force seeming to utter 
the words, and to draw into itself the other voices, 
appropriating their tone but lending them person- 
ality. These were the words I heard — 

" The High Priest once a year 
Went in the Holy Place 
With garments white and clear, 
It was the day of Grace. 

Without the people stood, 

While unseen and alone 
With incense and with blood 

He did for them atone. 

So we withoxit abide 

A few short passing years, 
While Christ who for us died 

Before our God appears. 

Before His Father there 

His sacrifice He pleads. 
And with unceasing prayer 

For us He intercedes." 



The Message 217 

The sweet sounds ceased; the organ Hngered for 
an instant in a low chord of infinite sweetness, and 
then a voice was heard in prayer. That there was 
a chapel in the house I knew, and that a brief morn- 
ing prayer was read there. But I could not help 
v.ondering at the remarkable distinctness with 
which I heard the words — they seemed close to my 
ear in the air beside me. I got up, and drawing 
my curtains found that it was day; and then I saw 
that a tiny window in the corner of my room, that 
gave on the gallery of the chapel, had been left 
open, by accident or design, and that thus I had 
been an auditor of the service. 

I found myself pondering over the words of the 
hymn, which was familiar to me, though strangely 
enough is to be found in but few collections. It is 
a perfect lyric, both in its grave language and its 
beautiful balance; and it is too, so far as such a 
composition can be, or ought to be, intensely dra- 
matic. The thought is just touched, and stated 
with exquisite brevity and restraint; there is not a 
word too much or too little ; the image is swiftly pre- 
sented, the inner meaning flashed upon the mind. 
It seemed to me, too, a beautiful and desirable 
thing to begin the day thus, with a delicate hallow- 
ing of the hours ; to put one gentle thought into the 
heart, perfumed by the sweet music. But then my 
reflections took a further drift; beautiful as the lit- 



218 The Thread of Gold 

tie ceremony was, noble and refined as the thought 
of the tender hymn was, I began to wonder whether 
we do well to confine our religious life to so 
restricted a range of ideas. It seemed almost un- 
grateful to entertain the thought, but I felt a cer- 
tain bewilderment as to whether this remote image, 
drawn from the ancient sacrificial ceremony, was 
not even too definite a thought to feed the heart 
upon. For strip the idea of its fair accessories, its 
delicate art, and what have we but the sad belief, 
drawn from the dark ages of the world, that the 
wrathful Creator of men, full of gloomy indigna- 
tion at their perverseness and wilfulness, needs the 
constant intercession of the Eternal Son, who is 
too, in a sense, himself, to appease the anger with 
which he regards the sheep of his hand. I cannot 
really in the depths of my heart echo that dark be- 
lief. I do not indeed know why God permits such 
blindness and sinfulness among men, and why he 
allows suffering to cloud and darken the world. 
But it would cause me to despair of God and man 
alike, if I felt that he had flung our pitiful race into 
the world, surrounded by temptation both within 
and without, and then abandoned himself to anger 
at their miserable dalliance with evil. I rather be- 
lieve that we are rising and struggling to the light, 
and that his heart is with us, not against us in the 
battle. It may of course be said that all that kind 



The Message 219 

of Calvinism has disappeared; that no rational 
Christians believe it, but hold a larger and a wider 
faith. I think that this is true of a few intelligent 
Christians, as far as the dropping of Calvinism 
goes, though it seems to me that they find it some- 
what difficult to define their faith; but as to Cal- 
vinism having died out in England, I do not think 
that there is any reason to suppose that it has done 
so; I believe that a large majority of EngHsh 
Christians would believe the above-quoted hymn to 
be absolutely justified in its statements both by 
Scripture and reason, and that a considerable min- 
ority would hardly consider it definite enough. 

But then came a larger and a wider thought. 
We talk and think so carelessly of the divine revela- 
tion; we, who have had a rehgious bringing up, who 
have been nurtured upon Israelite chronicles and 
prophecies, are incKned, or at least predisposed, to 
think that the knowledge of God is written larger 
and more directly in these records, the words of 
anxious and troubled persons, than in the world 
which we see about us. Yet surely in field and 
wood, in sea and sky, we have a far nearer and more 
instant revelation of God. In these ancient re- 
cords we have the thoughts of men, intent upon their 
own schemes and struggles, and looking for the 
message of God, with a fixed behef that the history 
of one family of the human race was his special and 



220 The Thread of Gold 

particular prepossession. Yet all the while his im- 
mediate Will was round them, written in a thousand 
forms, in bird and beast, in flower and tree. He 
permits and tolerates life. He deals out joy and 
sorrow, life and death. Science has at least re- 
vealed a far more vast and inscrutable force at work 
in the world, than the men of ancient days ever 
dreamed of. 

Do we do well to confine our religious life to 
these ancient conceptions? They have no doubt 
a certain shadow of truth in them; but while I 
know for certain that the huge Will of God is 
indeed at w^ork around me, in every field and w^ood, 
in every stream and pool, do I really know, do I 
honestly believe that any such process as the hymn 
indicates, is going on in some distant region of 
heaven? The hymn practically pre-supposes that 
our little planet is the onty one in which the work of 
God is going forward. Science hints to me that 
probably every star that hangs in the sky has its 
own ring of planets, and that in every one of these 
some strange drama of life and death is proceed- 
ing. It is a dizzy thought! But if it be true, is it 
not better to face it? The mind shudders, appalled 
at the immensity of the prospect. But do not such 
thoughts as these give us a truer picture of our- 
selves, and of our own humble place in the vast 
complexity of things, than the excessive dwelling 



The Message 221 

upon the wistful dreams of ancient law-givers and 
prophets? Or is it better to delude ourselves? De- 
liberately to limit our view to the history of a single 
race, to a few centuries of records? Perhaps that 
may be a more practical, a more effective view ; but 
when once the larger thought has flashed into the 
mind, it is useless to try and drown it. 

Everything around me seems to cry aloud the 
warning, not to aim at a conceit of knowledge about 
these deep secrets, but to wait, to leave the windows 
of the soul open for any glimpse of truth from 
without. 

To beguile the time I took up a volume near me, 
the work of a much decried poet, Walt Whitman. 
Apart from the exquisite power of expression that 
he possesses, he always seems to me to enter, more 
than most poets, into the largeness of the world, to 
keep his heart fixed on the vast wonder and joy of 
life. I read that poem full of tender pathos and 
suggestiveness, A Word out of the Sea, where the 
child, with the wind in his hair, listens to the lament 
of the bird that has lost his mate, and tries to guide 
her wandering wings back to the deserted nest. 
While the bird sings, with ever fainter hope, its lit- 
tle heart aching with the pain of loss, the child hears 
the sea, with its " liquid rims and wet sands " 
breathing out the low and delicious word death. 

The poet seems to think of death as the loving 



222 The Thre.\d of Gold 

answer to the yearning of all hearts, the sleep that 
closes the weary eyes. But I cannot rise to this 
thought, tender and gentle as it is. 

If indeed there be another life beyond death, I 
can well believe that death is in truth an easier and 
simpler thing than one fears; only a cloud on the 
hill, a little darkness upon Nature. But God has 
put it into my heart to dread it; and he hides from 
me the knowledge of whether indeed there be an- 
other side to it. And while I do not even know that, 
I can but love life, and be fain of the good days. 
All the religion in the world depends upon the be- 
lief that, set free from the bonds of the flesh, the 
spirit will rest and recollect. But is that more than 
a hope? Is it more than the passionate instinct of 
the heart that cannot bear the thought that it may 
cease to be? 

I seem to have travelled far away from the hymn 
that sounded so sweetly in my ears ; but I return to 
the thought; is not, I will ask, the poet's reverie — 
the child with his wet hair floating in the sea-breeze, 
the wailing of the deserted bird, the waves that mur- 
mur that death is beautiful — is not this all more 
truly and deeply religious than the hymn which 
speaks of things, that not only I cannot affirm to be 
true, but which, if true, would plunge me into a 
deeper and cheaper hopelessness even than that in 
which my ignorance condemns me to live? Ought 



The Message 223 

we not, in fact, to try and make our religion a much 
wider, quieter thing? Are we not exchanging the 
melodies of the free birds that sing in the forest 
glade, for the melancholy chirping of the caged 
linnet? It seems to me often as though we had 
captured our religion from a multitude of fair hov- 
ering presences, that would speak to us of the 
things of God, caged it in a tiny prison, and closed 
our ears to the larger and wider voices? 

I walked to-day in sheltered wooded valleys ; and 
at one point, in a very lonely and secluded lane, 
leaned long upon a gate that led into a little forest 
clearing, to watch the busy and intent life of the 
wood. There were the trees extending their fresh 
leaves to the rain; the birds slipped from tree to 
tree; a mouse frisked about the grassy road; a 
hundred flowers raised their bright heads. None 
of these little lives have, I suppose, any conception 
of the extent of life that lies about them; each of 
them knows the secrets and instincts of its own tiny 
brain, and guesses perhaps at the thoughts of the 
little lives akin to it. Yet every tiniest, shortest, 
most insignificant life has its place in the mind of 
God. It seemed to me then such an amazing, such 
an arrogant thing to define, to describe, to limit the 
awful mystery of the Creator and his purpose. 
Even to think of him, as he is spoken of in the Old 
Testament, with fierce and vindictive schemes, wdth 



224 The Thre^u) of Gold 

flagrant partialities, seemed to me nothing but a 
dreadful profanation. And yet these old writings 
do, in a degree, from old association, colour my 
thoughts about him. 

And then all these anxious visions left me; and I 
felt for awhile hke a tiny spray of seaweed floating 
on an infinite sea, with the brightness of the morning 
overhead. I felt that I was indeed set where I 
found myself to be, and that if now my little heart 
and brain are too small to hold the truth, yet I 
thanked God for making even the conception of the 
mystery, the width, the depth, possible to me ; and I 
prayed to him that he would give me as much of the 
truth as I could bear. And I do not doubt that he 
gave me that; for I felt for an instant that what- 
ever befall me, I was indeed a part of Himself ; not 
a thing outside and separate; not even his son and 
his child: but Himself. 



XL 



I HAD so strange a dream or vision the other 
night, that I cannot refrain from setting it down; 
because the strangeness and the wonder of it seem 
to make it impossible for me to have conceived of it 
myself; it was suggested by nothing, originated by 
nothing that I can trace; it merely came to me out 
of the void. 



After Death 225 

After confused and troubled dreams of terror 
and bewilderment, enacted in blind passages and 
stifling glooms, with crowds of unknown figures 
passing rapidly to and fro, I seemed to grow sud- 
denly light-hearted and joj^ful. I next appeared 
to myself to be sitting or reclining on the grassy top 
of a cliff, in bright sunlight. The ground fell pre- 
cipitously in front of me, and I saw to left and 
right the sharp crags and horns of the rock-face 
below me; behind me was a wide space of grassy 
down, with a fresh wind racing over it. The sky 
was cloudless. Far below I could see yellow sands, 
on which a blue sea broke in crisp waves. To the 
left a river flowed through a little hamlet, clustered 
round a church; I looked down on the roofs of the 
small houses, and saw people passing to and fro, 
like ants. The river spread itself out in shallow 
shining channels over the sand, to join the sea. 
Further to the left rose shadowy headland after 
headland, and to the right lay a broad well-watered 
plain, full of trees and villages, bounded by a range 
of blue hills. On the sea moved shijDS, the wind fill- 
ing their sails, and the sun shining on them with a 
peculiar brightness. The only sound in my ears 
was that of the whisper of the wind in the grass and 
stone crags. 

But I soon became aware with a shock of pleas- 
ant surprise that my perception of the whole scene 



226 The Thread of Gold 

was of a different quality to any perception I had 
before experienced. I have spoken of seeing and 
hearing: but I became aware that I was doing 
neither; the perceptions, so to speak, both of seeing 
and hearing were not distinct, but the same. I was 
aware, for instance, at the same moment, of the 
whole scene, both of what was behind me and what 
was in front of me. I have described what I saw 
successively, because there is no other way of de- 
scribing it ; but it was all present at once in my mind, 
and I had no need to turn my attention to one point 
or another, but everything was there before me, in 
a unity at which I cannot even hint in words. I 
then became aware too, that, though I have spoken 
of myself as seated or reclined, I had no body, but 
was merely, as it were, a sentient point. In a 
moment I became aware that to transfer that senti- 
ence to another point was merely an act of will. I 
was able to test this ; in an instant I was close above 
the village, which a moment before was far below 
me, and I perceived the houses, the very faces of 
the people close at hand; at another moment I was 
buried deep in the cliff, and felt the rock with its 
fissures all about me ; at another moment, following 
my wish, I was beneath the sea, and saw the untrod- 
den sands about me, with the blue sunlit water over 
my head. I saw the fish dart and poise above me, 
the ribbons of sea- weed floating up, just swayed 



Afi'er Death 227 

by the currents, shells crawling like great snails on 
the ooze, crabs hurrying about among piles of 
boulders. But something drew me back to my first 
station, I know not why; and there I poised, as a 
bird might have poised, and lost myself in a blissful 
dream. Then it darted into my mind that I was 
what I had been accustomed to call dead. So this 
was what lay on the other side of the dark passage, 
this lightness, this perfect freedom, this undreamed- 
of peace! I had not a single care or anxiety. It 
seemed as if nothing could trouble my repose and 
happiness. I could only think with a deep com- 
passion of those who were still pent in uneasy bod- 
ies, under strait and sad conditions, anxious, sad, 
troubled, and blind, not knowing that the shadow 
of death which encompassed them was but the cloud 
which veiled the gate of perfect and unutterable 
happiness. 

I felt rising in my mind a sense of all that lay 
before me, of all the mysteries that I would pene- 
trate, all the unvisited places that I would see. But 
at present I was too full of peace and quiet happi- 
ness to do anything but stay in an infinite content 
where I was. All sense of ennui or restlessness had 
left me. I was utterly free, utterly blest. I did, in- 
deed, once send my thought to the home which I 
loved, and saw a darkened house, and my dear ones 
moving about with grief written legibly on their 



228 The Thread of Gold 

faces. I saw my mother sitting looking at some 
letters "which I perceived to be my o^\ti, and was 
aware that she wept. But I could not even bring 
myself to grieve at that, because I knew that the 
same peace and joy that filled me was also surely 
awaiting them, and the darkest passage, the sharp- 
est human suffering, seemed so utterly little and 
trifling in the light of my new knowledge; and I 
was soon back on my cliff-top again, content to 
wait, to rest, to luxuriate in a happiness which 
seemed to have nothing selfish about it, because the 
satisfaction was so perfectly pure and natural. 

While I thus waited I became aware, with the 
same sort of sudden perception, of a presence be- 
side me. It had no outward form ; but I knew that 
it was a spirit full of love and kindness: it seemed 
to me to be old ; it was not divine, for it brought no 
awe with it ; and yet it was not quite human ; it was 
a spirit that seemed to me to have been human, but 
to have risen into a higher sphere of perception. I 
simply felt a sense of deep and pure companion- 
ship. And presently I became aware that some 
communication was passing between my conscious- 
ness and the consciousness of the newly-arrived 
spirit. It did not take place in words, but in 
thought; though only by words can I now repre- 
sent it. 

" Yes," said the other, " you do well to rest and 



Aftee Death 229 

to be happy: is it not a wonderful experience? and 
yet you have been through it many times already, 
and will pass through it many times again." 

I suppose that I did not wholly understand this, 
for I said: " I do not grasp that thought, though 
I am certain it is true: have I then died before? " 

" Yes," said the other, " many times. It is a long 
progress; you will remember soon, when you have 
had time to reflect, and when the sweet novelty of 
the change has become more customary. You have 
but returned to us again for a little ; one needs that, 
you know, at first ; one needs some refreshment and 
repose after each one of our lives, to be renewed, to 
be strengthened for what comes after." 

All at once I understood. I knew that my last 
life had been one of many lives lived at all sorts of 
times and dates, and under various conditions ; that 
at the end of each I had returned to this joyful 
freedom. 

It was the first cloud that passed over my 
thought. " Must I return again to life? " I said. 

"Oh, yes," said the other; "you see that; you 
will soon return again — but never mind that now; 
you are here to drink your fill of the beautiful 
things which you will only remember by glimpses 
and visions when you are back in the little life 
again." 

And then I had a sudden intuition. I seemed to 



230 The Thread of Gold 

be suddenly in a small and ugly street of a dark 
town. I saw slatternly women run in and out of 
the houses; I saw smoke-stained grimy children 
playing in the gutter. Above the poor, ill-kept 
houses a factory poured its black smoke into the 
air, and hummed behind its shuttered windows. I 
knew in a sad flash of thought that I was to be born 
there, to be brought up as a wailing child, under sad 
and sordid conditions, to struggle into a life of hard 
and hopeless labour, in the midst of vice, and pov- 
erty, and drunkenness, and hard usage. It filled 
me for a moment with a sort of nauseous dread, re- 
membering the free and liberal conditions of my 
last life, the wealth and comfort I had enjoyed. 

" No," said the other; for in a moment I was 
back again, " that is an unworthy thought — it is 
but for a moment ; and you will return to this peace 
again." 

But the sad thought came down upon me like a 
cloud. " Is there no escape? " I said; and at that, 
in a moment, the other spirit seemed to chide me, 
not angrily, but patiently and compassionately. 
" One suffers," he said, " but one gains experience; 
one rises," adding more gently: " We do not know 
why it must be, of course — but it is the Will; and 
however much one may doubt and suffer in the 
dark world there, one does not doubt of the wisdom 
or the love of it here." And I knew in a moment 



After Death 231 

that I did not doubt, but that I would go wiUingly 
wherever I should be sent. 

And then my thought became concerned with 
the spirit that spoke with me, and I said, " And 
what is your place and work? for I think you are 
like me and yet unlike." And he said: " Yes, it is 
true; I have to return thither no more; that is fin- 
ished for me, and I grudge no single step of the 
dark road: I cannot explain to you what my work 
or place is; but I am old, and have seen many 
things ; each of us has to return and return, not in- 
deed till we are made perfect, but till we have 
finished that part of our course; but the blessed- 
ness of this peace grows and grows, while it be- 
comes easier to bear what happens in that other 
place, for we grow strong and simple and sincere, 
and then the world can hurt us but little. We 
learn that we must not judge men; but we know 
that when we see them cruel and vicious and selfish, 
they are then but children learning their first les- 
sons; and on each of our visits to this place we see 
that the evil matters less and less, and the hope be- 
comes brighter and brighter; till at last we see." 
And I then seemed to turn to him in thought, for 
he said with a grave joy: " Yes, I have seen." And 
presently I was left alone to my happiness. 

How long it lasted I cannot tell; but present^ 
I seemed less free, less fight of heart; and soon I 



232 The Thrilu) of Gold 

knew that I was bound; and after a space I woke 
into the world again, and took up my burden of 
cares. 

But for all that I have a sense of hopefulness left 
which I think will not quite desert me. From 
what dim cell of the brain my vision rose, I know 
not, but though it came to me in so precise and clear 
a form, yet I cannot help feeling that something 
deep and true has been revealed to me, some glimpse 
of pure heaven and bright air, that lies outside our 
little fretted lives. 

XLI 

I HAVE spoken above, I know well, of things in 
which I have no skill to speak; I know no philoso- 
phy or metaphysics; to look into a philosophical 
book is to me like looking into a room piled up 
with bricks, the pure materials of thought; they 
have no meaning for me, until the beautiful mind of 
some literary architect has built them into a house 
of life; but just as a shallow pool can reflect the 
dark and infinite spaces of night, pierced with stars, 
so in my own shallow mind these perennial difficul- 
ties, which lie behind all that we do and say, can 
be for a moment mirrored. 

The only value that such thoughts can have in 
life is that they should teach us to live in a frank 



The Eternal Will 233 

and sincere mood, waiting patiently for the Lord, 
as the old Psalmist said. My own j^hilosophy is a 
very simple one, and, if I could only be truer to it, it 
would bring me the strength which I lack. It is 
this ; that being what we are, such frail, mysterious, 
inexplicable beings, we should wait humbly and 
hopefully upon God, not attempting, nor even 
wishing, to make up our minds upon these deep 
secrets, only determined that we will be true to the 
inner light, and that we will not accept any solution 
which depends for its success upon neglecting or 
overlooking any of the phenomena with which we 
are confronted. We find ourselves placed in the 
world, in definite relations with certain people, en- 
dowed with certain qualities, with faults and fears, 
with hopes and joys, with likes and dislikes. Evil 
haunts us like a shadow, and though it menaces our 
happiness, M^e fall again and again under its dom- 
inion; in the depths of our spirit a voice speaks, 
which assures us again and again that truth and 
purity and love are the best and dearest things that 
we can desire; and that voice, however, imperfectly, 
I try to obey, because it seems the strongest and 
clearest of all the voices that call to me. I try to 
regard all experience, whether sweet or bitter, fair 
or foul, as sent me by the great and awful power 
that put me where I am. The strongest and best 
things in the world seem to me to be peace and 



234 The Thread of Gold 

tranquillity, and the same hidden power seems to be 
leading me thither; and to lead me all the faster 
whenever I try not to fret, not to grieve, not to des- 
pair. " Casting all your care upon him, for he 
careth for you/' says the Divine Word; and the 
more that I follow intuition rather than reason, the 
nearer I seem to come to the truth. I have lately 
wasted much fruitless thought over an anxious de- 
cision, weighing motives, forecasting possibilities. 
I knew at the time how useless it all was, and that 
my course would be made clear at the right moment ; 
and I will tell the storj^ of how it was made clear, as 
testimony to the perfect guidance of the divine 
hand. I was taking a journey, and the weary pro- 
cess was going on in my mind; every possible argu- 
ment for and against the step was being reviewed 
and tested; I could not read, I could not even look 
abroad upon the world. The train drew up at a 
dull suburban station, where our tickets were col- 
lected. The signal was given, and we started. It 
was at this moment that the conviction came, and I 
saw how I must act, with a certainty which I could 
not gainsay or resist. My reason had anticipated 
the opposite decision, but I had no longer any 
doubt or hesitation. The only question was how 
and when to announce the result; but when I re- 
turned home the same evening there was the letter 
waiting for me which gave the very opportunity I 



The Eternal Will 235 

desired; and I have since learnt without surprise 
that the letter was being penned at the very moment 
when the conviction came to me. 

I have told this experience in detail, because it 
seems to me to be a very perfect example of the sud- 
denness with which conviction comes. But neither 
do I grudge the anxious reveries which for many 
days had preceded that conviction, because through 
them I learnt something of the inner weakness of 
my nature. But the true secret of it all is that we 
ought to live as far as we can in the day, the hour, 
the minute ; to waste no time in anxious forecasting 
and miserable regrets, but just do what lies before 
us as faithfully as possible. Gradually, too, one 
learns that the restricting of what is called religion 
to certain times of prayer and definite solemnities is 
the most pitiful of all mistakes; life lived with the 
intuition that I have indicated is all religion. The 
most trivial incident has to be interpreted; every 
word and deed and thought becomes full of a deep 
significance. One has no longer any anxious sense 
of duty; one desires no longer either to impress or 
influence; one aims only at guarding the qual- 
ity of all one does or says — ^or rather the very 
word "aims" is a wrong one; there is no longer 
any aim or effort, except the effort to feel which 
way the gentle guiding hand would have us to 
go; the only sorrow that is possible is when we 



236 The Thread of Gold 

rather perversely follow our own will and 
pleasure. 

The reason M^hy I desire this book to say its 
few words to my brothers and sisters of this life, 
without any intrusion of personality, is that I am 
so sure of the truth of what I say, that I would 
not have any one distracted from the principles I 
have tried to put into words, by being able to com- 
pare it with my own weak practice. I am so far 
from having attained; I have, I know, so many 
weary leagues to traverse yet, that I would not 
have my faithless and perverse wanderings known. 
But the secret waits for all who can throw aside 
convention and insincerity, who can make the sacri- 
fice with a humble heart, and throw themselves 
utterly and fearlessly into the hands of God. So- 
cieties, organisations, ceremonies, forms, authority, 
dogma — they are all outside; silently and secretly, 
in the solitude of one's heart, must the lonely path 
be found; but the slender track once beneath our 
feet, all the complicated relations of the world be- 
come clear and simple. We have no need to 
change our path in life, to seek for any human 
guide, to desire new conditions, because we have the 
one Guide close to us, closer than friend or brother 
or lover, and we know that we are set where he 
would have us to be. Such a belief destroys in a 
flash all our embarrassment in dealing with others, 



The Eternal Will 237 

all our anxieties in dealing with ourselves. In 
dealing with ourselves we shall only desire to be 
faithful, fearless, and sincere; in dealing with 
others we shall try to be patient, tender, apprecia- 
tive, and hopeful. If we have to blame, we shall 
blame without bitterness, without the outraged 
sense of personal vanity that brings anger with it. 
If we can praise, we shall praise with generous 
prodigality; we shall not think of ourselves as a 
centre of influence, as radiating example and pre- 
cept; but we shall know our own failures and diffi- 
culties, and shall realise as strongly that others are 
led likewise, and that each is the Father's peculiar 
care, as we realise it about ourselves. There will 
be no thrusting of ourselves to the front, nor an un- 
easy lingering upon the outskirts of the crowd, be- 
cause we shall know that our place and our course 
are defined. We may crave for happiness, but we 
shall not resent sorrow. The dreariest and saddest 
day becomes the inevitable, the true setting for our 
soul; we must drink the draught, and not fear to 
taste its bitterest savour; it is the Father's cup. 
That a Christian, in such a mood, can concern him- 
self with what is called the historical basis of the 
Gospels, is a thought which can only be met by a 
smile; for there stands the record of perhaps the 
only life ever lived upon earth that conformed it- 
self, at every moment, in the darkest experiences 



238 The Thread of Gold 

that life could bring, entirely and utterly to the Di- 
vine Will. One who walks in the light that I have 
spoken of is as inevitably a Christian as he is a hu- 
man being, and is as true to the spirit of Christ as 
he is indifferent to the human accretions that have 
gathered round the august message. 

The possession of such a secret involves no re- 
tirement from the world, no breaking of ties, no 
ecclesiastical exercises, no endeavour to penetrate 
obscure ideas. It is as simple as the sunlight and 
the air. It involves no protest, no phrase, no re- 
nunciation. Its protest wdll be an unconcerned ex- 
ample, its phrase will be a perfect sincerity of 
speech, its renunciation will be what it does, not 
what it abstains from doing. It will go or stay as 
the inner voice bids it. It will not attempt the im- 
possible, nor the novel. Very clearly, from hour to 
hour, the path will be made plain, the w^eakness for- 
tified, the sin purged away. It will judge no other 
life, it will seek no goal ; it will sometimes strive and 
cry, it will sometimes rest; it will move as gently 
and simply in unison with the one supreme will, as 
the tide moves beneath the moon, piled in the central 
deep with all its noises, flooding the mud-stained 
waterway, where the ships ride together, or creep- 
ing softly upon the pale sands of some sequestered 
bay. 



Until the Evening 239 

XLII 

I STOP sometimes on a landing in an old house, 
where I often stay, to look at a dusky, faded water- 
colour that hangs upon the wall. I do not think 
its technical merit is great, but it somehow has the 
poetical quality. It represents, or seems to repre- 
sent, a piece of high open ground, down-land or 
heath, with a few low bushes growing there, sprawl- 
ing and wind-brushed; a road crosses the fore- 
ground, and dips over to the plain beyond, a forest 
tract full of dark woodland, dappled by open spaces. 
There is a long faint distant line of hills on the hori- 
zon. The time appears to be just after sunset, 
when the sky is still full of a pale liquid light, be- 
fore objects have lost their colour, but are just be- 
ginning to be tinged with dusk. In the road stands 
the figure of a man, with his back turned, his hand 
shading his eyes as he gazes out across the plain. 
He appears to be a wayfarer, and to be weary but 
not dispirited. There is a look of serene and sober 
content about him, how communicated I know not. 
He would seem to have far to go, but yet to be cer- 
tainly drawing nearer to his home, which indeed he 
seems to discern afar off. The picture bears the 
simple legend. Until the evening. 

This design seems always to be charged for me 
with a beautiful and grave meaning. Just so would 



240 The Theead of Gold 

I draw near to the end of my pilgrimage, wearied 
but tranquil, assured of rest and welcome. The 
freshness and blithe eagerness of the morning are 
over, the solid hours of sturdy progress are gone, the 
heat of the day is past, and only the gentle descent 
among the shadows remains, with cool airs blowing 
from darkling thickets, laden with woodland scents, 
and the rich fragrance of rushy dingles. Ere the 
night falls the wayfarer will push the familiar gate 
open, and see the lamplit windows of home, with 
the dark chimneys and gables outlined against the 
green sky. Those that love him are awaiting him, 
listening for the footfall to draw near. 

Is it not possible to attain this? And yet how 
often does it seem to be the fate of a human soul to 
stumble, like one chased and haunted, with dazed 
and terrified air, and hurried piteous phrase, down 
the darkening track. Yet one should rather ap- 
proach God, bearing in careful hands the priceless 
and precious gift of life, ready to restore it if it be 
his will. God grant us so to live, in courage and 
trust, that, when he calls us, we may pass willingly 
and with a quiet confidence to the gate that opens 
into tracts unknown ! 



Conclusion 241 



CONCLUSION 

'And now I will try if I can in a few words to sum 
up what the purpose of this little volume has been, 
these pages torn from my hook of life, though I 
hope that soine of my readers may, before now, have 
discerned it for themselves. The Thread of Gold 
has two chief qualities. It is bright, and it is 
strong; it gleams with a still and precious light in 
the darkness, glowing with the reflected radiance 
of the little lamp that we carry to guide our feet, 
and adding to the ray some rich tinge from its own 
goodly heart; and it is strong too; it cannot easily 
be broken; it leads a man faithfully through the 
dim passages of the cave in which he wanders, with 
the dark earth piled above his head. 

The two qualities that we should keep with us in 
our journey through a world where it seems that so 
much must be dark, are a certain rich fiery essence y 
a glowing ardour of spirit, a mind of lofty temper, 
athirst for all that is noble and beautiful. That 
first; and to that we must add a certain soberness 
and sedateness of mood, a smiling tranquillity, a 
true directness of aim, that should lead us not to 
form our ideas and opinions too swiftly and too 
firmly; for then we suffer from an anxious vexation 



242 The Thread of Gold 

when experience contradicts hope, when things turn 
out different from what we had desired and sup- 
posed. We should deal with life in a generous and 
high-hearted mood, giving men credit for lofty aims 
and noble imaginings, and not he cast down if we 
do not see these jmrposes blazing and glowing on 
the surface of things; we should believe that such 
great motives are there even if we cannot see them; 
and then we should sustain our lively expectations 
with a deep and faithful confidence, assured that we 
are being tenderly and wisely led, and that the 
things which the Father shows us by the way, if 
they bewilder, and disappoint, and even terrify us, 
have yet some great and wonderful meaning, if we 
can but interpret them rightly. Nay, that the very 
delaying of these secrets to draw near to our souls, 
holds within it a strong and temperate virtue for 
our spirits. 

Neither of these great qualities, ardour and tran- 
quillity, can stand alone; if we aim merely at en- 
thusiasm, the fire grows cold, the world grows 
dreary, and we lapse into a cynical mood of bitter- 
ness, as the mortal flame burns low. 

Nor must we aim at mere tranquillity ; for so 
we may fall into a mere ptlacid acquiescence, a selfish 
inaction; our peace must he heartened by eager- 
ness, ovr zest calmed by serenity. If we follow thei 
fire alone, we become restless and dissatisfied; if we 



Conclusion 243 

seek only for peace^ we become like the patient 
beasts of the field. 

I would wish, though I grow old and grey-haired, 
a hundred times a day to ask why things are as they 
are, and to desire that they were otherwise; and 
again a hundred times a day I would thank God 
that they are as they are, and praise him for show- 
ing me his will rather than my own. For the secret 
lies in this; that we must not follow our own im- 
pulses, and thus grow pettish and self-willed; 
neither must we float feebly upon the will of God, 
like a branch that spins in an eddy; rather we must 
try to put our utmost energy in line with the will of 
God, hasten with all our might where he calls us, 
and turn our back as resolutely as we can when he 
bids us go no further; as an eager dog will intently 
await his master's choice, as to which of two paths 
he may desire to take; but the way once indicated, 
he springs forward, elate and glad, rejoicing with 
all his might. 

He leads me. He leads me; but He has also given 
me this wild and restless heart, these untamed de- 
sires; not that I may follow them and obey them, 
but that I may patiently discern His will, and do 
it to the uttermost. 

Father, be patient with me, for I yield myself to 
Thee; Thou hast given me a desirous heart, and 



244 The Thre^vd of Gold 

/ have a thousand times gone astray after vain 
shadows, and found no abiding joy. I have been 
weary many times, and sad often; and I have been 
light of heart and very glad; but my sadness and 
my weariness, my lightness and my joy have only 
blessed me, whenever I have shared them with Thee. 
I have shut myself up in a perverse loneliness, I 
have closed the door of my heart, miserable that I 
am, even upon Thee. And Thou hast waited 
smiling, till I knew that I had no joy apart from 
Thee. Only uphold me, only enfold me in Thy 
arms, and I shall be safe; for I know that nothing 
can divide us, except my own wilful heart; we for- 
get and are forgotten, but Thou alone rememb cr- 
est; and if I forget Thee, at least I know that Thou 
forgettest not me. 



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